Highlighting complex long-term succession pathways in mixed forests of the Pacific Northwest: a Markov chain modelling approach
Fecha
2021Versión
Acceso abierto / Sarbide irekia
Tipo
Artículo / Artikulua
Versión
Versión publicada / Argitaratu den bertsioa
Impacto
|
10.3390/f12121770
Resumen
Forest succession is an ecological phenomenon that can span centuries. Although the
concept of succession was originally formulated as a deterministic sequence of different plant
communities by F. Clements more than a century ago, nowadays it is recognized that stochastic
events and disturbances play a pivotal role in forest succession. In spite of that, forest maps and
management plans aroun ...
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Forest succession is an ecological phenomenon that can span centuries. Although the
concept of succession was originally formulated as a deterministic sequence of different plant
communities by F. Clements more than a century ago, nowadays it is recognized that stochastic
events and disturbances play a pivotal role in forest succession. In spite of that, forest maps and
management plans around the world are developed and focused on a unique “climax” community,
likely due to the difficulty of quantifying alternative succession pathways. In this research, we
explored the possibility of developing a Markov Chain model to study multiple pathway succession
scenarios in mixed forests of western red cedar, hemlock and Pacific silver fir on northern Vancouver
Island (western Canada). We created a transition matrix using the probabilities of change between
alternative ecological stages as well as red cedar regeneration. Each ecological state was defined
by the dominant tree species and ages. Our results indicate that, compared to the traditional
Clementsian, deterministic one-pathway succession model, which is unable to replicate current stand
distribution of these forests in the region, a three-pathway stochastic succession model, calibrated
by a panel of experts, can mimic the observed landscape distribution among different stand types
before commercial logging started in the region. We conclude that, while knowing the difficulty of
parameterizing this type of models, their use is needed to recognize that for a given site, there may
be multiple “climax” communities and hence forest management should account for them. [--]
Materias
Ecological disturbances,
Stochastic modelling,
Sustainable forest management,
Climax community,
Mixedwoods,
Ecological model,
Ecological complexity
Editor
MDPI
Publicado en
Forests 2021, 12, 1770
Departamento
Universidad Pública de Navarra. Departamento de Ciencias /
Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa. Zientziak Saila
Versión del editor
Entidades Financiadoras
This research was funded by the SCHIRP, Western Forest Products, and Natural Sciences
and Engineering Research Council of Canada