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  • Long-term responses of canopy-understorey interactions to disturbance severity in primary Picea abies forests
    Bače, Radek ...
    Questions How do canopy-understory interactions respond to variation in disturbance severity over extended periods of time? For forests with different disturbance histories, do light availability and ... understory-cohort densities converge towards a common old-growth structure, or do historical legacies influence populations indefinitely?. Locations Remnants of primary spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) forests throughout Germany, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania. Methods A disturbance history of more than 200 years was reconstructed from 11 278 tree cores collected from forest plots (n = 520). Understory tree densities of two size classes and hemi-photo based light availabilities were inventoried and modelled as functions of the severity of the main disturbance and time since the event. Results Variation in understory tree densities had a hump-shaped distribution through time. Stem densities were approximately static in the least disturbed sites, and they declined in relation to disturbance severity over approximately 100 years. Similar to patterns of stem densities, initially high understory light availability also reached a minimum at 100 years, which indicated crown closure. Following this, light availability and stem densities both increased as stands transitioned from stem exclusion to understory reinitiation. The effect of disturbance severity on understory densities and patchiness in light availability persisted for more than 200 years. Conclusions Long-term trends in canopy-understory interactions validate current conceptual models of forest development. Furthermore, we empirically validate that these conceptual models generalize over gradients in disturbance severity. Higher-disturbance sites exhibited a more even-aged character with more pronounced periods of stem exclusion, canopy closure, and understory reinitiation; forests with low-severity disturbance histories yielded a more stationary uneven-aged structure. The model identified the extent of variation in disturbance severity within which these P. abies forests are able to regenerate and retain their monospecific character, which is increasingly relevant as disturbance regimes continue to shift under global climate change.
    Source: Journal of vegetation science : official organ of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). - ISSN 1100-9233 (Vol. 28, iss. 6, 2017, str. 1128-1139)
    Type of material - article, component part
    Publish date - 2017
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 4892838

    Link(s):

    https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12581
    DOI

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