Silvicultural disturbance severity and plant communities of the southern Canadian boreal forest
By S. Haeussler, L. Bedford, Alain Leduc, Yves Bergeron, J. Kranabetter. 2002
163 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Boreal forest ecosystems are adapted to periodic disturbance, but there is widespread concern that conventional forest practises degrade plant communities. We examined vegetation diversity and composition after clearcut logging, mechanical and chemical site preparation in eight 5to 12-yr old studies located in southern boreal forests of British Columbia and Quebec, Canada to fi nd useful indicators for monitoring ecosystem integrity and to provide recommendations for the development and testing of new silvicultural approaches. Community-wide and species-specifi c responses were measured across gradients of disturbance severity and the results were explained in terms of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis and a simple regeneration model based on plant life history strategies. Species richness was 30 to 35% higher 5 to 8 years after clearcut logging than in old forest. Total and vascular species diversity generally peaked on moderately severe site treatments, while non-vascular diversity declined with increasing disturbance severity. On more-or-less mesic sites, there was little evidence of diversity loss within the range of conventional silvicultural disturbances; however, there were important changes in plant community composition. Removing soil organic layers caused a shift from residual and resprouting understory species to ruderal species regenerating from seeds and spores. Severe treatments dramatically increased non-native species invasion. Two important challenges for the proposed natural dynamics-based silviculture will be 1) to fi nd ways of maintaining populations of sensitive non-vascular species and forest mycoheterotrophs, and 2) to create regeneration niches for disturbance-dependent indigenous plants without accelerating non-native species invasion.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Insect Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae05b73eb3b4539dfba72aa68ae4559d8276868e
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Citations in the corpus
- Impacts of restoration treatments on alien plant invasion in Pinus ponderosa forests, Montana, USA (2006, background): “Similar relationships have been documented following harvest in coastal Pacific north-west forests, USA (Thysell & Carey 2001) and southern Canadian boreal forests (Haeussler et al. 2002), and following prescribed burning in Australia (Milberg & Lamont 1995) and South America (Petryna et al. 2002).”
- How resilient are northern hardwood forests to human disturbance? An evaluation using a plant functional group approach (2007, unknown): “�aeussler et al., 2002; 12.”
- Understory Vegetation Dynamics of North American Boreal Forests (2006, background): “Following forest harvesting, understory diversity increases in response to increases in resource availability and colonisable microsites (Peltzer et al., 2000; Haeussler et al., 2002; Rees and Juday, 2002).”