PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 79: Forest Ecology: Communities, Species Richness, and Coarse Woody Debris
Wednesday, August 10, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 518 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Patterns of down dead wood in the Great Lake States.

Sabor, Alexia^*,1, Radeloff, Volker¹, ¹ Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Madison, WI, USA

ABSTRACT- Woody debris is an increasing management focus in forests, often with an emphasis on the importance of retaining it for wildlife habitat or other ecological roles. However, despite the importance of downed dead wood in ecosystems, it has not been well characterized for regions outside the Pacific Northwest. Here, we describe the relationship between fine and coarse woody debris (FWD and CWD) and other variables such as land ownership, housing density, forest type, and stand age using Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data from 194 plots in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Total length of CWD exhibits a negative relationship with housing density; areas with no houses had a mean length of 8.4 m for CWD while areas with 16-32 houses/km2 had a mean CWD length of only 4.3 m. Conversely, mean diameter of CWD does not exhibit a clear relationship with housing density. General linear models indicate that that housing density, ecological subsection, land ownership, and forest type are all significant in determining the abundance of fine woody debris and both length and diameter of coarse woody debris and explain between 18-49% of the variation in these data. In agreement with other studies, our results show that the species composition of standing live trees and coarse woody debris may be very different, with > 45% of plots exhibiting CWD types that differed from the current live forest type. In general, our results highlight that patterns of CWD and FWD may be considerably altered in response to changes in both forest types and human development.

Key words: coarse woody debris, fine woody debris, forest ecology, human impacts