Drought can favour the growth of small in relation to tall trees in mature stands of Norway spruce and European beech
By Hans Pretzsch, G. Schütze, Peter Biber. Forest Ecosystems, 2018
102 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundClimate change triggered many studies showing that trends and events of environmental conditions can reduce but also accelerate growth at the stand and individual tree level. However, it is still rather unknown how climate change modifies the growth partitioning between the trees in forest stands.MethodsBased on long-term girth-tape measurements in mature monospecific and mixed-species stands of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) we traced the effect of the severe droughts in 2003 and 2015 from the stand down to the tree level.ResultsStand growth of Norway spruce decreased by about 30% in the once-in-a-century drought 2015, while European beech was much more drought resistant. Water availability generally amplified size-asymmetric growth partitioning. Especially in case of Norway spruce water availability primarily fostered the growth of predominant trees, whereas drought favoured the growth of small trees at the expense of the predominant ones. We could not detect significant differences between mixed and monospecific stands in this regard.ConclusionsThe drought-induced reallocation of growth in favour of small trees in case of spruce may result from its isohydric character. We hypothesize that as small trees are shaded, they can benefit from the reduced water consumption of their sun-exposed taller neighbours. In case of beech, as an anisohydric species, tall trees suffer less and smaller trees benefit less under drought. The discussion elaborates the consequences of the water dependent growth allocation for forest monitoring, growth modelling, and silviculture.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/220b824075d397a0d9206d49ce375c303569faff
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Citations in the corpus
- Species mixing reduces drought susceptibility of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and oak (Quercus robur L., Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.) – Site water supply and fertility modify the mixing effect (2020, background): “We assume that when soil water is not the limiting factor, competition for light may become more relevant, resulting in a more asymmetric mode of competition (Hara, 1988; Schwinning and Weiner, 1998; Pretzsch and Biber, 2010; Pretzsch et al., 2018).”