This temporary addition of spruce trees evidently exceeded the number of wind-thrown retention trees; about 1/4 of retention trees are estimated to have Ku-0059436 datasheet fallen in the Gudrun
storm (Swedish Forest Agency, 2006). Considering that retention approaches are becoming increasingly common in boreal and temperate regions (Gustafsson et al., 2012) the development of structural components over time in Sweden can indicate possible developments in other parts of the world where clearcutting with retention is practiced. In regions where forests have been used for industrial extraction of timber during several decades, like in parts of North Europe, structures of importance to biodiversity have become heavily depleted. If retention approaches are applied in such areas, a trend similar to Sweden with increasing amounts of dead and living trees in young forests can be expected. On the other hand, the situation will be opposite in regions where forestry is expanding into intact forests which have never been industrially logged,
like in parts of Russia, South America, Canada and Australia. Compared to such forests, conventional logging, even if combined with 5–10% Ibrutinib datasheet retention levels, will lead to changed forests with lower structural diversity (e.g. Peterken, 2001 and Kuuluvainen, 2009). Thus, in such regions retention is not a restoration action but instead a way to keep as much as possible of forests in natural conditions. When harvest is considered for such forests, forms of conservation-oriented partial cutting offer alternatives for a sustainable Fossariinae forestry (e.g. Götmark et al., 2005 and Bauhus et al., 2009). Our study shows that data from national forest inventories, designed in a similar way as the Swedish one, can reveal changes over time in the structural diversity of young forests created by retention actions, even at low retention
levels. Interesting future analyses include to project development for long time periods, to understand temporal fluctuations but also spatial patterns of retained trees. To model amounts of living and dead trees over time, better knowledge is needed on the mortality rate of different tree species, and also on the decay rate of dead wood. Assuming that retention will become a permanent practice, in 100 years time when all forests have been harvested at least once in Sweden, 3% of the total area of production forest would be expected to be set aside as retention (Swedish Forest Agency, 2012). In total, this amounts to almost 700,000 ha of forest land, and would complement nature reserves and other larger areas formally protected by the state. The study was supported by a grant to Lena Gustafsson from the Swedish Research Council Formas (215-2009-569), and conducted within the research program Smart Tree Retention.
Related posts:
- This left 186 trees for the analysis of population genetics param
- Human pressure on forests, caused by population growth, diffused
- In the degraded soils that typify restoration sites, conditions m
- Heterogeneity at multiple spatial scales is a key component
- , 2007 and Staland
et al , 2011) Hence, it is important