Forest age and composition changes cluster along disturbance-history boundaries

Evidence

As a companion to Reading the Forested Landscape, Forest Forensics focuses on how to interpret the region’s five most common forms of forest disturbance—agricultural abandonment, logging, blowdowns, fire, and ice and snow breakage—while you are out in the woods. In many forests different sections will have dissimilar histories. For example one area might have been a sheep pasture abandoned to grow back to forest in the nineteenth century while an adjacent area may have always been forested and used to supply timber and fuel wood. In such instances it will be important to wander a bit and look for changes in forest age or composition of trees. These changes will often occur at the boundary between sections of forest with different histories. It is along these boundaries where you will often find your most useful evidence—stone walls or boundary trees in this case—to help you interpret a forest’s history. — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Boundary-seeking as method parallels the site-history interpretation thread and the lies-of-the-land ways of seeing in the polyad. — connects to: Landscape reading answers some histories while opening further questions — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 28; Pit-and-mound features persist for nearly a millennium after a tree falls — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 16; The same disturbance-diversity dynamics governing forest trees also structure moss communities on logs — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 371 (+9 more)

Related

• The same disturbance-diversity dynamics governing forest trees also structure moss communities on logs (similarity 0.80)
• Species responses to cutting reveal their historical disturbance regime (similarity 0.80)
• Community vegetation maps remain unlinked to exact stand ages (similarity 0.80)
• Contrasting stand ages let fire boundaries be traced on airphoto maps. (similarity 0.79)
• Forest disturbance regimes differ mainly in timing, spacing, and severity, not rate. (similarity 0.79)
• Tom Wessels — Forest Forensics A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Species responses to cutting reveal their historical disturbance regime #expands (0.85) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 263
• The same disturbance-diversity dynamics governing forest trees also structure moss communities on logs #expands (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 371
• Disturbance patches in a perennial matrix differ functionally from total removal. #qualifies (0.72) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 561
• Field observation can date land abandonment from tree growth records #expands (0.72) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 207