Dynamik dichter, gleichförmiger Gebirgsfichtenwälder

Abstract

Dynamics of dense, uniform spruce-dominated mountain forests Dense, uniform stands have increased in spruce-dominated mountain forests during the last century and often cause silvicultural problems. During recent years, different research activities at Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have addressed the development of such mountain forests with or without active management. For this, plots of the Swiss National Forest Inventory (NFI) between 1983/1985 and 2004/2006 have been analysed, dendroecological methods have been used to investigate competition and selfthinning processes and a reassessment of WSL long-term investigation plots has been conducted. NFI plots of stands which have already been dense during the first inventory period generally showed increasing basal area, stagnating stem numbers, strongly increasing amounts of deadwood and slightly increasing regeneration levels, both in managed and in unmanaged stands. Dendroecological field studies confirm that trees in the generally about 80 to 150 years old stands were strongly affected by competition-induced self-thinning and subsequent small-scale mortality processes few decades after stand initiation already. WSL long-term investigation plots generally confirm this dominance of relatively small-scale processes, but also show potential for silvicultural interventions, especially in early stages of self-thinning. According to the guidelines for silvicultural intervention in forests with protective functions (NAIS), an active management of later self-thinning stages with already short crowns and higher mortality should focus on stands where risks have to be considered as too high, based on hazard and damage potential and the size of the dense, uniform stands.