Extreme events wipe out entire forests, dramatically eliminating complex ecosystems as well as local communities.
Extreme events wipe out entire forests, dramatically eliminating complex ecosystems as well as local communities.
Researchers have become quite familiar with such attention-grabbing events over the years. They know less, however, about the more common moderate-severity disturbances, such as relatively small fires, ice storms, and outbreaks of pests or pathogens.
“Since they’re more common, they’re probably playing a larger role in the ecosystem than we might have appreciated before,” said Brady Hardiman, associate professor of forestry and natural resources and environmental and ecological engineering in Purdue University’s College of Agriculture. “At any given time, a huge fraction of the forested landscape is undergoing or regrowing from a moderate-severity disturbance, which took out some of the trees but not all of them. The forest is not regrowing from scratch.”
A paper published in the Journal of Ecology by Purdue University researchers and their co-authors has identified how moderate-severity disturbances leave different patterns of change in the forest canopy structure. Hardiman and his colleagues based their findings on lidar (light detection and ranging) data collected at five sites of the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia and Tennessee.
Read More: Purdue University
Photo Credit: Purdue University/Cameron Wingren
