This coming season should be a good one for maple syrup producers in New England.

That’s the word from Joshua Rapp, who co-authored a Tufts study on the best way to predict syrup production.

“Well 2014 – this year – was a low seed year, so we expect that the trees should have plenty of sugar left over in their stores so that the sap will have a fairly high sugar count …and we expect it to be a pretty good syrup season in 2015.”

Rapp and his co-author found the most valuable metric to predict syrup yield is how many seeds the trees produce during the summer before.  They say weather is a factor, but a less important one. The research appears in the journal “Forest Ecology and Management.”