On Arbor Day, April 28, 2000, MSU's Office of Campus Parks and Planning and the Grounds Department transplanted an "American" spruce from a plantation at the Tree Research Center to the Natural Resources Building grounds to commemorate James Hanover and his contributions to MSU and the forestry profession.
Jim was a Forestry Department faculty member from 1966 until his untimely death from lymphoma in 1992. Jim was a nationally recognized forest geneticist whose research interests were extremely varied and ranged from applied tree improvement to biomass species screening to examining the genetics of terpene variability in conifers to producing specialty chemicals from trees.