A relation between historical forest use and current dead woody material in a boreal protected old-growth forest in Finland

Abstract

Assessing the human impact on the naturalness and vegetation characteristics of protected areas is one of the key issues when designing forest conservation networks in Fennoscandia. We studied the small-scale, detailed relationship between forest utilization history and the current availability of dead woody material in a protected old-growth forest area in North Karelia, eastern Finland. From the study area of 32.4 ha, all the stumps (diameter ≥ 5 cm and height < 1.3 m, classified as natural, man-made and of undetermined origin) were measured using 25 × 25 m sub-plots. Standing and fallen dead trees (dbh ≥ 5 cm) were measured on 50 × 50 m plots in an area of 7.8 ha. The average number of stumps was 130 per ha, and over half of the stumps were classified as man-made. However, the historical documents since the 1910s showed no logging in the area: some of the largest man-made stumps probably originated from an earlier time, but most of those stumps were made considerably later. The variation in the total number of stumps (per ha) was great (range 0-560/ha, 0-16 m 2 /ha), with no clear clustering in space. However, clustering of man-made stumps was detected. The average volume of pooled standing and fallen trees was 84 m 3 /ha, with a range of 37-146 m 3 /ha. The other noticeable man-made disturbance besides logging was notching of aspens, which has a scatteredly significant influence on the amount of dead trees. In conclusion, the protected old-growth forest was not as a whole in a natural state but showed different degrees of human impact from virtually untouched patches to quite heavily managed patches. The results suggest that the number of manmade stumps may be a relatively quick and easy method of assessing the naturalness of woody biomass structure in the Fennoscandian boreal forests.

Coarse Woody Debris Variability Due to Human Accessibility to Forest

“…In addition, the stumps are the evidence of past harvesting activity and represent a proxy of removed trees and wood volume in recent times [55]. In the study area, the stump volumes are a clear indicator of the homogeneity of the management activity, since they show similar features [51,56]. It should be stressed that the local population does not have permission to cut standing trees, therefore stumps were not created by rural people.…”

“…They also noticed that it was more than twice as much as in production forests. Managed forests show a CWD volume lower than in unmanaged forests [44,50,51]. High variability even characterizes the CWD amount in the Hyrcanian forests.…”

Comparing the Quantity and Structure of Deadwood in Selection Managed and Old-Growth Forests in South-East Europe

“…Namely, decayed wood is very rich in nutrients [59], and the presence of different decay classes in a forest greatly influences wood-inhabiting species richness and diversity [13]. In addition, decay class distribution can be used as an indicator of the history of a forest [60]. In the present study, in both MFs and OGFs, the volume of logs and stumps increased from the first to higher decay classes ( Table 3), indicating that the disturbance regime (or harvesting) was either more intensive in the past or that the CWD in the study area requires very long periods to decompose completely.…”

Surviving the Winter in Northern Forests: An Experimental Study of Fuelwood Consumption and Living Space in a Sami Tent Hut

“…The trees used as fuelwood in this study had an average volume of 0.16 m 3 and an average dbh of 17.5 cm (Table 1), which is smaller than the likely average size of pine trees in the preindustrial landscape (cf. Rouvinen et al, 2005; LARS Ö STLUND ET AL. / 379 2010b).…”