Precarious resilience of the boreal forest of eastern North America during the Holocene

Abstract

The dynamics of the boreal forest has followed several successional trajectories during the Holocene caused by recurrent stand-scale, abiotic and biotic disturbances. Under stable environmental conditions, site disturbances should favor the regeneration of forest communities enabling the recovery process to produce forests similar to the pre-disturbance states. However, a failure in the post-disturbance recovery process can also occur to shift the forest communities to alternative states. Although fire is the main disturbance factor affecting the dynamics of the boreal forest, long-term resilience of most forest ecosystems remains poorly known because of lack of stand-scale paleoecological evidence. To evaluate the resilience ability of boreal forest ecosystems, we reconstructed their Holocene fire history and documented their successional pathways at the stand scale in two climatically-contrasted regions (western continental versus eastern humid climates of boreal Québec, Canada) based on botanically-identified and 14C-dated soil charcoal remains. Since mid-Holocene, western closed-crown conifer forests were resilient to fire disturbance, but hardwood trees declined significantly. Yet in the eastern region, closed-crown conifer forests similar to that observed today seems to have remained in place since its origin. In both regions, moderate fire frequency leads to a recurrence dynamics that favors renewal of forests stands with the same composition. However, balsam fir – paper birch stands follow a successional pattern characterized by the establishment of paper birch, with subsequent increasing abundance of balsam fir. This allows the maintenance of forests composed of these species, whose dominance fluctuates according to the time elapsed since the last fire. The succession from black spruce to balsam fir stands seems to be an uncommon process that requires a prolonged fire-free period. Although most closed-crown forests are resilient postfire ecosystems which have persisted over several millennia, their resilience is precarious as evidenced by the transformation of some forests into lichen woodlands after fire.