––Leaf litter accumulation during fire exclusion and increases in tree density in postsettlement southwestern Pinus ponderosa forests may limit the establishment of understory vegetation. We performed an experiment in P. ponderosa forests of northern Arizona to ascertain plant community responses to forest-floor scarification and Oi removal on thirty-six 100-m2 plots overlaid on an existing eco...

Wind disturbance profoundly shapes temperate forests but few studies have evaluated patterns and mechanisms of long-term forest dynamics following major windthrows. In 1990, we initiated a large hurricane simulation experiment in a 0.8-ha manipulation (pulldown) and 0.6-ha control area of a maturing Quercus rubra--Acer rubrum forest in New England. We toppled 276 trees in the pulldown, using a ...

Ungulate browsing affects many plant species, shifting patterns of relative abundance, plant community diversity, and ecosystem processes. Despite the strength and diversity of ungulate impacts, we lack comprehensive methods and a unified network for tracking and comparing ungulate impacts across the Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes Network Office (GLN) of the National Park Service has ident...

The more xeric southand west-facing slopes of the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas once supported fire-maintained shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) forests with a well-developed herbaceous understory. Fire suppression following the original harvest of these forests resulted in forests with increasingly abundant woody vegetation in the understory, midstory, and canopy, and a very suppre...

Pervasive forest mortality is expected to increase in future decades as a result of increasing temperatures. Climate-induced forest dieback can have consequences on ecosystem services, potentially mediated by changes in forest structure and understory community composition that emerge in response to tree death. Although many dieback events around the world have been documented in recent years, ...

Scant information is available on how soil phosphorus (P) availability responds to atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition, especially in the tropical zones. This study examined the effect of N addition on soil P availability, and compared this effect between forest sites of contrasting land-use history. Effects of N addition on soil properties, litterfall production, P release from decomposing lit...

Establishing seedlings in subtropical plantations is very important for forest health, succession and management. Information on seedling nutrient concentrations is essential for both the selection of suitable indigenous tree species to accelerate succession of the established plantation and sustainable forest management. In this study, we investigated the concentrations of nitrogen ([N]), phos...

The impact of secondary succession of grassland communities towards a Norway spruce forest on soil microbial community was studied on a belt transect established in the Pol’anaMts., Central Europe. Data on understory vegetation, light availability, soil properties and microbial activity were collected on 147 plots distributed over regular grid. Moreover, distributions of functional groups of mi...

This study reconsidered the cause of forest decline of Japanese red pine (Pinus densiflora Sieb. et Zucc.) in the Seto Inland Sea area, western Japan. Although the decline in pine forests was attributed to pine-wood nematode infection, the stress of air pollution was also shown to have negative physiological effects on pine needles. Secondary pollutants related to NOx accumulate in the morning ...

It is proposed that increases in anthropogenic reactive nitrogen (Nr ) deposition may cause temperate and boreal forests to sequester a globally significant quantity of carbon (C); however, long-term data from boreal forests describing how C sequestration responds to realistic levels of chronic Nr deposition are scarce. Using a long-term (14-year) stand-scale (0.1 ha) N addition experiment (thr...