Quantifying the effects of remnant seed sources on post-volcanic-eruption forest recovery through historic landscape reconstruction from 1710 to 2010

Abstract

The rate and trajectory of forest landscape recovery after a volcanic eruption rely largely on available seed sources and patterns of seed dispersal. However, quantifying the importance of various seed sources has not been attempted. We demonstrate a forest landscape modeling framework for spatiotemporal reconstruction of post-volcanic-eruption forest landscape. We quantify the effects of remnant seed sources on post-eruption forest landscape recovery at tree species level in Changbai Mountain, China. We used a factorial experiment of modeled scenarios with/without remnant seed sources and/or matrix seed sources. We applied the modeling framework to reconstruct the post-eruption forest landscape from 1710 to 2010. Remnant seed sources’ contribution to basal area and density was minimum before year 1810 and 1770, and increased to maximum at 1940 (51%) and 1840 (79%), respectively. Remnant seed sources contributed > 40% to stand age from 1740 to 1870. Remnant seed sources’ contribution to species area was minimum at 1760 for all species, while it increased to > 40% at 2010 for some late-successional species. Remnant seed sources have relatively small effects in the early stage of post-volcanic-eruption forest landscape recovery. This is different from what has been reported of other disturbances such as wind and fire. Remnant seed sources facilitate late-successional species recovery, advance forest succession, and increase stand age. These findings coincide with reports of other types of disturbances. Spatiotemporal historic landscape reconstruction provides a platform to simulate seed dispersal and quantify the roles of remnant seed sources on post-disturbance landscape recovery.