Should I remove or save my sugar maple?
Sugar Maple isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. It is the tree everyone wants and the one that quietly dies in a subdivision — sugar maple is among the least salt- and compaction-tolerant shade trees there is, and it is no longer recommended for street planting anywhere in the Midwest. A sugar maple fifteen feet off a salted road on stripped subdivision clay is on a decline clock from the day it goes in, which is why so many central Indiana quotes on this species are removals of trees that are only forty years old.
How to tell which one you've got
Sugar maple decline runs top-down — thin upper crown, undersized leaves, marginal leaf scorch by August, then a stag-headed silhouette of bare upper branches against live lower growth. The most useful field tell in Indiana is fall-color timing: a sugar maple blazing in early September while everything around it is still green is stressed, not early, and once more than roughly a third of the crown is dead it will not recover.
The structural question
Better in ice than its reputation suggests — in the ISA's Urbana ice-storm survey sugar maple showed little severe damage, because its coarse, relatively low-density branching sheds ice load better than fine-twigged species. When a sugar maple does fail here it is almost always decay-driven or a split at an old codominant fork with included bark, not general brittleness, so the inspection is about unions and cavities rather than crown weight.
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