Long-Term Changes in Forest Productivity: A Consistent Assessment in Even-Aged Stands

By J. Bontemps, J. Hervé, J. Dhote. Forestry sciences, 2009

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The objective of the study was to provide a stand-scale assessment of long-term productivity changes in even-aged stands and to depict their chronology over the 20th century. We focused on dominant height growth as a proxy for productivity, reconstructed from stem analyses in temporary plots. Height increments from two generations of stands were compared. Stands were associated in pairs to ensure accurate control of intrinsic site fertility conditions. The historical evolution of the growth rate was estimated using a statistical modeling approach based on a mixed-effects model, with a control of both site and developmental stage effects. We placed emphasis on a model formulation that leads to a meaningful interpretation of growth rate evolution. We applied the methodology to a sample of 14 stand pairs and 84 stem analyses of common beech in northeastern France. An accelerated increase in growth rate was identified, reaching +50% over the 20th century. The trend also displayed short-term growth anomalies.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e0c0a059217ec8a93dc5b6926174024349a5d80

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In Environmental Engineering

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Models for supporting forest management in a changing environment (2011, background): “Environmental change, however, challenges the assumption of constant site quality (Bontemps et al., 2009), which underlies the use of the site index concept, and thus the use of these traditional models.”
Forest Growth and Yield Modeling (2011, background): “Bontemps et al. (2009) illustrated this, as they found that an accelerated dominant height increment for European beech in France was evident for much of the twentieth century and has reached over 60% of the normal rate.”
Climate change and European forests: what do we know, what are the uncertainties, and what are the implications for forest management? (2014, background): “In north-eastern France for example, Bontemps et al. (2009, 2010) observed a decline in dominant radial and height growth of beech in the 1990s, which was confirmed by Charru et al. (2010).”