Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Boreal forests are one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks and provide a variety of ecosystem services. With the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss in these forests, industries that utilize the natural products within the forests share a responsibility to maintain the forest and the ecosystem services they provide. With the majority of vegetation studies focusing on trees, understory vegetation and the services they provide are often overlooked. The Swedish model of forestry is being questioned on its ability to replicate natural disturbances as it is unclear on the differences between clear-cuts and fire disturbances. This study investigates how clear-cuts and fire disturbed forest stands differ over time through nitrogen, plant traits, and biodiversity values. I observed a chronosequence of managed and fire burned stands and measured the total cover, species composition, and available nutrient pools to investigate the differences. The results of this study emphasises the responses forests and their understory have to different disturbances over a long period and show that managed stands had higher available nitrogen pools in the soil, a novel species composition compared to the fire burned stands, and lowered biodiversity values over time. Stands with a known fire history had lower available nitrogen pools, an expected species composition, and higher alpha diversity and lower beta diversity over time. This study highlights the different complex responses understory plants have to management over the long term and shows that management on forests lead to faster degradation of soil and biodiversity over time.