Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The forest setting
- 2 The disturbance regime and its components
- 3 Sampling and interpretation of stand disturbance history
- 4 Disturbance, stand development, and successional trajectories
- 5 The study of disturbance and landscape structure
- 6 The disturbance regime and landscape structure
- 7 Disturbance in fragmented landscapes
- 8 Forest stability over time and space
- References
- Appendix 1
- Index
6 - The disturbance regime and landscape structure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The forest setting
- 2 The disturbance regime and its components
- 3 Sampling and interpretation of stand disturbance history
- 4 Disturbance, stand development, and successional trajectories
- 5 The study of disturbance and landscape structure
- 6 The disturbance regime and landscape structure
- 7 Disturbance in fragmented landscapes
- 8 Forest stability over time and space
- References
- Appendix 1
- Index
Summary
Knowledge of stand dynamics (Chapter 4) and landscape structure (Chapter 5) are combined in this chapter to examine in detail the relationship between disturbance and landscape characteristics. The topics progress from wind regimes to fire regimes to complex regimes with wind, fire and herbivory (this latter topic was introduced in Chapter 2). Detailed case studies of landscape characteristics and their sensitivity to changes in disturbance regime are considered in each case. Then two more important issues are introduced that can interact with fire, wind and herbivory to provide even more complexity to landscape structure: (1) disturbance size, and (2) interactions among trees themselves, or neighborhood effects. As we will see here and Chapter 8, trees superimpose a patch-forming mechanism of their own onto that created by disturbance dynamics.
Wind regimes and landscape structure
Windstorms have a great effect on structure and development of individual stands across the landscape in the Great Lakes Region. They pockmark the landscape with young stands in initiation and stem-exclusion phases of development. If wind is the dominant disturbance type in an ecosystem, the combination distribution of stand ages will result, because stands are not susceptible to massive blowdown until they reach the late stem-exclusion or demographic-transition phases, after which they will be hit at random by stand-leveling windstorms. Winds of less than standleveling force also create gaps in older stands, thereby determining the timing and size of new cohorts in multi-aged forests.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Forest Dynamics and Disturbance RegimesStudies from Temperate Evergreen-Deciduous Forests, pp. 150 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002