Assessing stand structure in successional stages of dark coniferous forests in western Sichuan, China

Abstract

Subalpine dark coniferous forests in the western Sichuan Province of China play an important role in the hydrological processes in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Second-growth forests, with different stand successional stages, have developed as a result of logging over the past 50 years. Forest cover and stand structure changed greatly with concomitant degradation of forest ecosystem functions. To understand how the stand structures of the second-growth forests change during the stand succession process, we analyzed stand structure characteristics and an old-growth state index of the bamboo and moss-forest types. We found that stand structure at the young successional stage featured one-third of the structure characteristics of the old-growth dark coniferous forests, while the structure of the medium-aged stage had reached half the structure of the old-growth state. The two forest types were similar in the rate of development at the young successional stage but differed at the medium-aged stage; the moss-forest type had more advanced development than the bamboo-forest type at the medium-aged successional stage.