European beech is one of the most important deciduous tree species in natural forest ecosystems Central Europe. Its dominance now being questioned by emerging drought damages due to increased incidence severe summer droughts. In Switzerland, Fagus sylvatica have been observed Intercantonal Forest Observation Program since 1984. The dataset presented here includes 179176 annual observations tree...

Introduction: Due to the non-developed mechanization situation, chainsaw is a widely used tool in Iranian forests. This tool can trigger unwelcome disorders (e.g., white finger syndrome) due to the transmitted vibrations from its handle to the body members. Characterizing these vibrations can result in minimizing the intensity of these disorders. This study aims to investigate the effect of dif...

Specialist herbivores are thought to often enhance or maintain plant diversity within ecosystems, because they prevent their host species from becoming competitively dominant. In contrast, specialist herbivores are not generally expected to have negative impacts on non-hosts. However, we describe a cascade of indirect interactions whereby a specialist sooty mold (Scorias spongiosa) colonizes th...

The allometric equations developed by Whittaker et al. (1974) at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest have been used to estimate biomass and productivity in northern hardwood forest systems for over three decades. Few other species-specific allometric estimates of belowground biomass are available, because of the difficulty of collecting the data, and such equations are rarely validated. Using...

Research on root community structure is currently limited by the methodologies available. We evaluated a molecular-sequence-based approach to quantify the relative abundance of roots from different plant species in mixed samples. We extracted DNA from mixtures of roots, amplified the trnL intron by polymerase change reaction, and identified up to 60 clones from each mixture. We tested the effec...

European beech (Fagus sylvatica L., hereafter beech), one of the major native tree species in Europe, is known to be drought sensitive. Thus, the identification of critical thresholds of drought impact intensity and duration are of high interest for assessing the adaptive potential of European beech to climate change in its native range. In a common garden experiment with one-year-old seedlings...

During the last meeting in Karlsruhe the authors presented a paper [1] providing background information about the determination of the characteristic bending strength of beech glulam. A design proposal was derived to calculate the characteristic bending strength depending on the characteristic tensile strength of the lamellae and the characteristic finger joint bending strength. It was experime...

Following a full mast production in autumn 1995 in the old growth beech forest of la Tillaie, France, cupules, live and dead yearling seedlings were counted in September 1996 in 40 plots, embracing a wide range of ecological conditions. The influence of geomorphology and forest stage on mast production and on seedling establishment and survival was studied. Maximum seedling abundance did not oc...

A significant loss of biodiversity resulting from human activity has caused biotic homogenisation to become the dominant process shaping forest communities. In this paper, we present a rare case of biotic differentiation in European temperate deciduous forest herb layer vegetation. The process is occurring in nutrient poor oak-hornbeam forests in mountain areas (Polish Eastern Carpathians, Cent...