The direct and indirect effect of fire on radial growth of Pinus koraiensis trees in a northern temperate forest of China

Abstract

Abstract:The long-term effects of fire on the radial growth of Korean pines (Pinus koraiensis) in Changbai Mountain is poorly understood. In order to quantify the impact of fire on the radial growth of Korean pines, we measured ring widths and developed two tree-ring chronologies from 21 burned Korean pine trees that were damaged by fire in 1857 as well as 30 control trees in the Changbai Mountain Nature Reserve, China. As expected, the growth rates of the burned trees were slower than those of the control trees in the first five years following the fire. However, beginning six years after the fire, the growth of the burned trees increased considerably, and this period of increased growth lasted 13 years, with moderate growth occurring throughout the 1866 to 1871 period. A difference in growth rates between burned and control tress was also observed for the 20 years since temperatures began markedly increasing in 1980. Burned trees tended to respond negatively to monthly minimum temperature, precipitation, and vapor pressure deficits (VPD), whereas the positive relationship between those factors and radial growth of control trees became stronger. In addition, the significantly negative effect of competition on radial growth was only observed among burned trees. These results demonstrated that the negative and direct effect of damage to physiological plant processes by fire only affected the years shortly after a fire occurred and then became obscured by its indirect effects, such as differential responses to climate and competition, which did persist for a long time. The indirect effect on radial growth over time could be explained by the variability in the relative strength of climatic responses and competition caused by fire.

Радіальні Прирости Деревостанів Рекреаційно-Оздоровчих Лісів Придністровського Передкарпаття (Івано-Франківська Область)

“…З внутрішніх чинників найбільший вплив мають порода дерева [14,21,26], спадкова індивідуальна мінливість, вік і плодоношення [1,5,11]. Із зовнішніх факторів на величину приросту впливають широтні, поздовжні і висотні градієнти умов місцезростання дерев [3,12,22], температура повітря і опади [4,9,12,21], ґрунтові умови [17], фітоценотичні взаємини [11,19], різного роду катастрофи (пожежі [2], вітровали і буреломи [7], хвороби, напади шкідливих комах [20,27]), господарська діяльність людини [10,15,18] та інші фактори.…”

Radial increment in European spruce (Picea abies) as indicator of sanitary condition of spruce forests in the Ukrainian Carpathians

“…Among the internal factors, the greatest effects are related to the species of the tree (Magnuszewski et al, 2015;Sitková et al, 2018, Burri et al, 2019, inherited individual variability, age and fruiting (Ding et al, 2017;Latreille et al, 2017;Buras et al, 2018). The most influential external factors are latitudinal, longitudinal and height gradients of the conditions of growth locations of the trees (Magnuszewski et al, 2015;Matskovsky, 2016;Chen, 2017;Gao et al, 2018), air temperature and precipitations (Natalini et al, 2015;Rybníček et al, 2016;Rozas & Olano, 2017), wind (Dinulica et al, 2016), mist (Myskow et al, 2019), soil conditions (Mendivelso et al, 2016), phytocenosis relations (Latreille et al, 2017;Moreau et al, 2019), catastrophes of various origin: fires (Gao et al, 2017), windthrows and windsnaps (Holeska et al, 2016), diseases, attacks of harmful insects (Brygadyrenko, 2016;Faly et al, 2017;Van de Gevel et al, 2017;, summer and winter droughts, emissions of CO 2 (Cavlovic et al, 2015;Svobodova et al, 2019), heavy frosts during snowless periods (Su-vanto et al, 2017), and also agricultural activity by humans (Montoro Girona et al, 2016;Tyukavina et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2018). Forest felling, meso-and macro scale effects on the environment lead to negative tendencies of radial increment and deforestation (Rodriguez-Caton, 2015).…”