Abstract
Developing forest harvesting regimes that mimic natural forest dynamics requires knowledge on typical species behaviors and how they respond to environmental conditions. Species regeneration and survival after disturbance depends on a species’ life history traits. Therefore, forest succession determines the extent to which forest communities are able to cope with environmental change. The aim of this review was to (i) review the life history dynamics of hemi-boreal tree species in the context of ecological succession, and (ii) categorize each of these tree species into one of four successional development groups (gap colonizers, gap competitors, forest colonizers, or forest competitors). To do this we embraced the super-organism approach to plant communities using their life history dynamics and traits. Our review touches on the importance and vulnerability of these four types of successional groups, their absence and presence in the community, and how they can be used as a core component to evaluate if the development of the community is progressing towards the restoration of the climatic climax. Applying a theoretical framework to generate ideas, we suggest that forests should be managed to maintain environmental conditions that support the natural variety and sequence of tree species’ life histories by promoting genetic invariance and to help secure ecosystem resilience for the future. This could be achieved by employing harvesting methods that emulate natural disturbances and regeneration programs that contribute to maintenance of the four successional groups.
Highlights
Forests are complex systems of interacting organisms; to manage them for tree species composition and production we need thorough knowledge of the variety of tree species’ life histories and how they interact
Using life history dynamic traits (e.g., natural regeneration dynamics, establishment, and growth (Table 1 and Supplemental Materials 1), we categorized each of Lithuania’s forest tree species into one of the four types of successional groups based on environmental specialization of species and tree regeneration modes in forest gaps (Table 2)
The variety of tree species’ life history traits and how they interact, constantly evolving toward the climatically determined end communities or climatic climax, is a manifestation of already existing genetic information, written in the genomes of species, which has remained practically unchanged for time periods in the order of several million years
Summary
Forests are complex systems of interacting organisms; to manage them for tree species composition and production we need thorough knowledge of the variety of tree species’ life histories and how they interact. The fundamental principle underlying the theory of invariance is that the laws of nature always have the same form for all observers [19] This implies that all the elements of any developing living system interact, and all elements are ecologically equivalent, as the essence of ecological law and processes lies in invariance by which a living system following a disturbance returns to its stable state [20,21]. From an organism-centered perspective, developing forest management and exploitation regimes that mimic the natural conditions as closely as possible requires the determination of the degree to which typical species behaviors are responsible for the emergence of climatic climax [31,32,33,34,35,36]. We discuss how they can be used to evaluate if the development of the community is progressing towards the restoration of the climatic climax
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