Lead Author: Tom Ovenden
Alistair S. Jump, Danielle L. Thompson, David I. Forrester, Jazz Rhoades, Maurizio Mencuccini, Mike Perks, Tom Ovenden, Victoria Stokes
| Understanding how we can increase the resilience of forest systems to future extreme drought events is increasingly important as these events become more frequent and intense. Diversifying production forests using intimate mixtures of trees with complementary functional traits is considered as one promising silvicultural approach that may increase drought resilience. However, the direction and magnitude of the drought response of mixed-species stands relative to monospecific stands of the same species can vary with species identity, relative abundance and levels of competition in a focal tree’s immediate neighbourhood. Using a long-term experiment where tree-level mortality and the neighbourhood composition of each tree was known, we assessed the radial growth response of 24-year-old Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) trees in intimately mixed and monospecific stands to a short-duration, high-intensity spring drought in Scotland. Mixing proportions included 25:75, 50:50 and 75:25 of P. sylvestris and P. sitchensis. At the species level, Scots pine was more drought resistant and resilient than Sitka spruce, while Sitka spruce showed higher recovery. Surprisingly, neither pre-drought tree size nor neighbourhood competition were significantly associated with resistance or resilience to drought, and trees of both species within monospecific stands showed higher recovery and resilience than trees growing in mixed stands. Our study suggests intimate mixtures of these two species may not be an effective way to mitigate the negative impacts of future extreme spring drought events. Given that these two species comprise almost 70% of coniferous forests in the UK, our results highlight the pressing need to better understand their vulnerability to drought and the conditions under which intimate mixtures of these species could be beneficial or detrimental. Such knowledge is essential if we are to enable forest managers to effectively plan how to adapt these forests to the challenges of a changing climate. |
This project aims to quantify the historic impact and legacy of extreme climatic events on UK forests using tree-ring chronologies, climate and soil data. It focuses on species of major importance to UK forestry in order to provide the information basis for building adaptive capacity into future forest planning and decision-making.
Understanding the impacts of extreme drought on forest productivity requires a comprehensive assessment of tree and forest resilience. However, current approaches to quantifying resilience limit our understanding of forest response dynamics, recovery trajectories and drought legacies by constraining the temporal scale and resolution of assessment. We compared individual tree growth histories with growth forecasted using […]
Many studies quantify short-term drought impact on tree growth relative to pre-drought growth averages. However, fewer studies examine the extent to which droughts of differing severity differentially impact tree growth or shape stand dynamics. Focusing on three droughts in high and low density stands of Pinus sylvestris in Scotland, we calculated pre-drought growth averages using […]
