Pre-treatment analysis of woody vegetation composition and structure on the hardwood ecosystem experiment research units

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• Saunders, Michael R.
• Arseneault, Justin E.

Year Published

2013

Publication

In: Swihart, Robert K.; Saunders, Michael R.; Kalb, Rebecca A.; Haulton, G. Scott; Michler, Charles H., eds. 2013. The Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment: a framework for studying responses to forest management. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-108. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station: 96-125.

Abstract

In long-term, large-scale forest management studies, documentation of pre-treatment differences among and variability within experimental units is critical for drawing the proper inferences from imposed treatments. We compared pre-treatment overstory and large shrub communities (diameters at breast height >1.5 cm) for the 9 research cores with the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) in south-central Indiana with a total of 683 0.1-ha sampling plots. There were many significant differences (p < 0.05) in stand structure among the cores for many attributes, but intra-core variability was not severe enough to lead to significant differences in structural attributes for the proposed management treatments (that is, when data were averaged across three replicates in each management treatment, there were no significant differences). Ordinations of plot-level data showed that all cores occupied much of the same ordination space, suggesting that forest structure was highly variable within cores but did not differ as much between cores. Plot-level maps of species composition and size structure also showed large degrees of variability within each research core and hinted at spatial patterning not yet captured well by HEE inventories. We suggest that future projects and subsequent analyses of the HEE better capture intra-stand variability in both abiotic and biotic components through spatially explicit methodologies.

Keywords

• bats
• beetles
• birds
• Central Hardwoods
• experiment
• forest management
• human attitudes
• Indiana
• moths
• oak
• reptiles
• salamanders
• silviculture
• small mammals
• wildlife

Citation

Saunders, Michael R.; Arseneault, Justin E. 2013. Pre-treatment analysis of woody vegetation composition and structure on the hardwood ecosystem experiment research units. In: Swihart, Robert K.; Saunders, Michael R.; Kalb, Rebecca A.; Haulton, G. Scott; Michler, Charles H., eds. 2013. The Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment: a framework for studying responses to forest management. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-108. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station: 96-125.

Last updated on: March 1, 2013

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https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/42916