Disturbance History and Dynamics of an Old-Growth Nothofagus Forest in Southern Patagonia

Fire disturbance and forest structure in an old-growth Pinus ponderosa forest, southern Cascades, USA

Questions: Did fire regimes in old-growth Pinus ponderosa forest change with Euro-American settlement compared to the pre-settlement period? Do tree age structures exhibit a pattern of continuous regeneration or is regeneration episodic and related to fire disturbance or fire-free periods? Are the forests compositionally stable? Do trees have a clumped spatial pattern and are clumps evenor mixe...

Disturbance history and climate response in an old-growth hemlock-white pine forest, central Pennsylvania

Conserving old-growth forest diversity in disturbance-prone landscapes.

A decade after its creation, the Northwest Forest Plan is contributing to the conservation of old-growth forests on federal land. However the success and outlook for the plan are questionable in the dry provinces, where losses of old growth to wildfire have been relatively high and risks of further loss remain. We summarize the state of knowledge of old-growth forests in the plan area, identify...

The Disturbance Regime of an Old-Growth Forest in Coastal California

This study deals with the disturbance regime of an old-growth, mixed-evergreen forest with a canopy composed of Arbutus menziesii, Lithocarpus densiflora, Pseudotsuga menziesii, Quercus chrysolepis, Q. wislizenii, and Sequoia sempervirens. 80 canopy gaps were randomly selected from throughout a 230-ha watershed. Of the land area sampled, 11.1 to 16.6 % was within gaps. Gap area had a mode of < ...

The steady-state mosaic of disturbance and succession across an old-growth Central Amazon forest landscape.

Old-growth forest ecosystems comprise a mosaic of patches in different successional stages, with the fraction of the landscape in any particular state relatively constant over large temporal and spatial scales. The size distribution and return frequency of disturbance events, and subsequent recovery processes, determine to a large extent the spatial scale over which this old-growth steady state...