Abstract
Most temperate forests in U.S. are recovering from heavy exploitation and are in intermediate successional stages where partial tree harvest is the primary disturbance. Changes in regional forest composition in response to climate change are often predicted for plant functional types using biophysical process models. These models usually simplify the simulation of succession and harvest and may not consider important species‐specific demographic processes driving forests changes. We determined the relative importance of succession, harvest, and climate change to forest composition changes in a 125‐million ha area of the Central Hardwood Forest Region of U.S. We used a forest landscape modeling approach to project changes in density and basal area of 23 tree species due to succession, harvest, and four climate scenarios from 2000 to 2300. On average, succession, harvest, and climate change explained 78, 17, and 1% of the variation in species importance values (IV) at 2050, respectively, but their contribution changed to 46, 26, and 20% by 2300. Climate change led to substantial increases in the importance of red maple and southern species (e.g., yellow‐poplar) and decreases in northern species (e.g., sugar maple) and most of widely distributed species (e.g., white oak). Harvest interacted with climate change and accelerated changes in some species (e.g., increasing southern red oak and decreasing American beech) while ameliorated the changes for others (e.g., increasing red maple and decreasing white ash). Succession was the primary driver of forest composition change over the next 300 years. The effects of harvest on composition were more important than climate change in the short term but climate change became more important than harvest in the long term. Our results show that it is important to model species‐specific responses when predicting changes in forest composition and structure in response to succession, harvest, and climate change.
Highlights
Temperate deciduous forests are among the major biomes on earth and provide important ecological, economic, and social services to society
We addressed three questions of general interests to ecologists, conservationists, and especially land managers in the Central Hardwood Forest Region of U.S (CHFR): (1) How will tree species’ importance values change under alternative climate and harvest scenarios? (2) What is the relative importance of succession, harvest, and climate change in determining the future changes in species importance value? (3) How will the relative importance of succession, harvest, and climate change vary among species and over time?
We predicted changes in species importance values (IV) from 2000 to 2300 in a temperate deciduous forest taking into account succession, disturbance, and climate change and quantified their relative importance to these changes
Summary
Temperate deciduous forests are among the major biomes on earth and provide important ecological, economic, and social services to society. As large-scale industry timber harvest moved from temperate deciduous forests to other less explored forest biomes, fine spatial scale (,10 ha) non-industrial timber harvest, mostly in the form of partial harvest of large trees of preferred species, becomes the primary anthropogenic disturbance (Shifley et al 2012). These disturbances can change forest composition and structure and alter successional trajectories (Schuler 2004, Deluca et al 2009). Climate change may affect species establishment and mortality and alter forest composition in the region (Iverson et al 2008, Morin and Thuiller 2009, Mette et al 2013, Brandt et al 2014)
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