Five permanent sample plots (SPs; 200–250 trees per plot) were established in middle-aged high-grade suburban pine stands near the industrial city of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia. Needle damage, inventory parameters of the stands, and the defense response of the stem phloem were evaluated annually for the years 2002–2019 and attributed to acute or chronic toxic exposures (creeping fire or industrial pollutants, respectively). The results form a basis for using trees as bioindicators. A newly elaborated stem lesion test was formed from a hypothesis on the upward sugar transport for the regeneration of an injured crown, based on Eschrich’s model of bidirectional sugar transport in the phloem. The formation of a phloem lesion was induced by inoculation of the stem with a mycelial extract of the ophiostomatoid fungus Ceratocystis laricicola. The lesion length and its shift relative to the inoculation hole were measured. An increase in the length of needles at early stages of stand weakening by pollutants was found to correspond to the hormesis model (Selye’s adaptation syndrome). A possibility of assessing the chronology of pollutant toxicity and the duration of the recovery period after creeping fire was shown.
Two methods for evaluation of pine stand vigor were tested on permanent sample plots near Krasnoyarsk City: visual evaluation and exposure to fungal metabolites. In the first case, forest vigor was estimated using the six-point system of the Sanitary Regulations of the Russian Federation as the mean score for 200 trees on the sample plots. In the second case, the vigor was evaluated from the size of the necrotic spot on inner bark of the tree after inoculation of 22-25 randomly chosen pines with the extract of fungus Ceratocystis laricicola Redfern and Minter. The necrotic spot size was significantly larger in pines from polluted forest as compared to background one. This points to the decrease in infection protection of trees affected by pollution, although visual evaluation of the stand vigor could not distinguish the polluted and background stands.
This article is part of the special series "Environmental Monitoring on Global and Local Scales." The series documents cases of the current state of environmental assessment and tracking using different approaches: in situ monitoring, geoinformation modeling, and risk-based assessment. The work was originally presented at the conference "Ecological Monitoring: Methods and Approaches," held September 2021 in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, and co-organized with the European and Russian-Language Branches of Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
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