Juvenile plants often have tight microhabitat associations because of specific requirements for seed germination and subsequent establishment. Due to their larger size, adults may be more adept at coping with stress. However, few studies consider the role of ontogeny in structuring plant populations, even though phenotypic expression can change through life history. In cypress-tupelo swamps of ...

Abstract Many mosses and lichens thrive in high-elevation subalpine forests even become dominant species on the forest floor. Although they play an irreplaceable ecological role forest, less is known about their eco-physiological status, how photosynthesis-related functional traits differ from those of co-occurring vascular plants. We determined carbon, nitrogen phosphorus concentrations stoich...

This study focuses on two Mediterranean beech forests located in northern and southern Italy and therefore subjected to different environmental conditions. The research goal was to understand C storage in the forest floor and mineral soil and the major determinants. Relative to the northern forest (NF), the southern forest (SF) was found to produce higher amounts of litterfall (4.3 vs. 2.5 Mg·h...

To date, it is not clear which are the factors that most influence tropical forest recovery from hurricanes. Increased canopy openness and increased detritus (debris) deposition are two of the most likely factors, but due to their simultaneous occurrence during a hurricane, their relative effects cannot be separated without a manipulative experiment. Hence, in the Luquillo Experimental Forest (...

European earthworms are invading previously worm-free hardwood forests across Minnesota and the Great Lakes region. In many of these forests, earthworm invasions have been associated with the loss of a previously thick forest floor. The ability of earthworms to alter and control ecosystem processes has been demonstrated in agricultural systems, but the dynamics and impact of these invasions in ...

Effects of prescribed fires on the 1-year establishment of white oak seedlings were investigated on the Clemson Experimental Forest, South Carolina, USA. Three stands, each consisting of a burn and a control treatment of about 1 ha in size, were examined in the study. On each burn and control treatment, six to eight dominant white oak trees were randomly selected along the slope and four 2-m ra...

In this study we characterized spatial heterogeneity of soil carbon and nitrogen pools, soil moisture, and soil pH of the first 15 cm of the soil profile; depth of the organic horizon; forest floor covers; and understory vegetation abundances in three sites (1999, 1987 and 1920 wildfires) of a boreal forest chronosequence of interior Alaska. We also investigated the cross-dependence between und...

In this study, artificial neural network analyses (ANN) were used to identify the forcing environmental variables that are most significant in governing the transpiration rates of an Austrian Pine stand and its forest floor. Latent heat flux densities (Lh) of the Austrian Pine stand and its forest floor were separately measured using the eddy covariance technique. To assess the sensitivity of t...

The boreal forest is one of the largest terrestrial biomes and plays a key role for the global carbon balance and climate. The forest floor vegetation has a strong influence on the carbon and nitrogen cycles of the forests and is sensitive to changes in temperature conditions and nutrient availability. Additionally, the effects of climate warming on forest floor vegetation have been suggested t...