Effects of thinning on drought vulnerability and climate response in north temperate forest ecosystems
TLDR
Results suggest that thinning generally enhanced drought resistance and resilience; however, this relationship showed a pronounced reversal over time in stands maintained at lower tree densities, and the importance of accounting for stand structure when predicting climate-change impacts to forests is highlighted.Abstract:
Reducing tree densities through silvicultural thinning has been widely advocated as a strategy for enhancing resistance and resilience to drought, yet few empirical evaluations of this approach exist. We examined detailed dendrochronological data from a long-term (>50 years) replicated thinning experiment to determine if density reductions conferred greater resistance and/or resilience to droughts, assessed by the magnitude of stand-level growth reductions. Our results suggest that thinning generally enhanced drought resistance and resilience; however, this relationship showed a pronounced reversal over time in stands maintained at lower tree densities. Specifically, lower-density stands exhibited greater resistance and resilience at younger ages (49 years), yet exhibited lower resistance and resilience at older ages (76 years), relative to higher-density stands. We attribute this reversal to significantly greater tree sizes attained within the lower-density stands through stand development, which in turn increased tree-level water demand during the later droughts. Results from response–function analyses indicate that thinning altered growth–climate relationships, such that higher-density stands were more sensitive to growing-season precipitation relative to lower-density stands. These results confirm the potential of density management to moderate drought impacts on growth, and they highlight the importance of accounting for stand structure when predicting climate-change impacts to forests.read more
Citations
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On underestimation of global vulnerability to tree mortality and forest die‐off from hotter drought in the Anthropocene
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify ten contrasting perspectives that shape the vulnerability debate but have not been discussed collectively and present a set of global vulnerability drivers that are known with high confidence: (1) droughts eventually occur everywhere; (2) warming produces hotter Droughts; (3) atmospheric moisture demand increases nonlinearly with temperature during drought; (4) mortality can occur faster in hotter Drought, consistent with fundamental physiology; (5) shorter Drought can become lethal under warming, increasing the frequency of lethal Drought; and (6) mortality happens rapidly
Journal ArticleDOI
The impacts of increasing drought on forest dynamics, structure, and biodiversity in the United States.
James S. Clark,Louis R. Iverson,Christopher W. Woodall,Craig D. Allen,David M. Bell,Don C. Bragg,Anthony W. D'Amato,Frank W. Davis,Michelle H. Hersh,Inés Ibáñez,Stephen T. Jackson,Stephen N. Matthews,Neil Pederson,Matthew P. Peters,Mark W. Schwartz,Kristen M. Waring,Niklaus E. Zimmermann +16 more
TL;DR: Insights from current understanding of drought impacts at stand-to-biogeographic scales are synthesized, including management options, and challenges to be addressed are identified, indicating that more complex models may provide limited guidance.
Journal ArticleDOI
Contemporary forest restoration: A review emphasizing function
TL;DR: The science underpinning contemporary approaches to forest restoration practice is synthesized and some major approaches for altering structure in degraded forest stands are presented, and approaches for restoration of two key ecosystem processes, fire and flooding are described.
Journal ArticleDOI
Potential of forest thinning to mitigate drought stress: A meta-analysis
TL;DR: In this paper, a meta-analysis was conducted to assess the potential of thinning for improving tree performance during and after a severe drought in conifers and broadleaves.
Journal ArticleDOI
Structural overshoot of tree growth with climate variability and the global spectrum of drought-induced forest dieback
Alistair S. Jump,Paloma Ruiz-Benito,Paloma Ruiz-Benito,Sarah Greenwood,Craig D. Allen,Thomas Kitzberger,Rod Fensham,Rod Fensham,Jordi Martínez-Vilalta,Francisco Lloret +9 more
TL;DR: It is shown that periods of favourable climatic and management conditions that facilitate abundant tree growth can lead to structural overshoot of aboveground tree biomass due to a subsequent temporal mismatch between water demand and availability, which expects forests to become increasingly structurally mismatched to water availability and thus overbuilt during more stressful episodes.
References
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A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests
Craig D. Allen,Alison K. Macalady,Haroun Chenchouni,Dominique Bachelet,Nate G. McDowell,Michel Vennetier,Thomas Kitzberger,Andreas Rigling,David D. Breshears,Edward H. Hogg,Patrick Gonzalez,Rod Fensham,Zhen Zhang,Jorge Castro,N.A. Demidova,Jong Hwan Lim,Gillian Allard,Steven W. Running,Akkin Semerci,Neil S. Cobb +19 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the first global assessment of recent tree mortality attributed to drought and heat stress and identify key information gaps and scientific uncertainties that currently hinder our ability to predict tree mortality in response to climate change and emphasizes the need for a globally coordinated observation system.
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Estimating Potential Evapotranspiration
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DENDROCLIM2002: A C++ program for statistical calibration of climate signals in tree-ring chronologies ☆
Franco Biondi,Kishor Waikul +1 more
TL;DR: DENDROCLIM2002 is an extension of existing task-specific software, which is mostly MS-DOS based, and of available user-supplied code for statistical packages, such as SAS, that incorporates the ability to test for temporal changes of dendroclimatic relationships by means of evolutionary and moving intervals.
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