Species responses to cutting reveal their historical disturbance regime

Evidence

The responses of individual species to different silvicultural systems can also be used to estimate the natural disturbance regime of forests originally dominated by those species. For instance, because beech and sugar maple are favored by selection cutting, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the beech-maple forest region (Braun, 1950) was characterized by a prevalence of small-scale gap disturbance. Also, because beech is very susceptible to damage by fire (Fowells, 1965), the small-scale disturbances most common to this forest region must have been due to wind or glaze storms. — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 263

Categorization

• XREF: This is a lovely inversion-of-method nugget for Reading the Landscape pedagogy: infer past natural disturbance from today’s tree species’ regeneration behavior. — connects to: Forest age and composition changes cluster along disturbance-history boundaries — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 30; Repeat disturbances near old gaps are common and favor growth-suppression alternating species — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 230; Disturbance predictions must be mechanistic, incorporating history and context — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 2242

Broader Connections

• Repeat disturbances near old gaps are common and favor growth-suppression alternating species #corroborates (0.78) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 230