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Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2015

  • Title: Understory plant community structure and diversity on hurricane tip-up mounds
  • Author: Katrina M Fernald (Wheaton College (MA))
  • Abstract:

    Understory plants compose a majority of the vascular plant species in New England hardwood forests. Tree fall gaps and the resources they provide are one major driver in controlling the distribution microenvironments for the understory plant community. Wind events, such as hurricanes, also create tip-up mounds, which alter the topography of the forest floor and create microenvironments for understory plants. This study aims to determine whether the tip-up complexes formed by windthrown trees add to the diversity of understory microenvironments. In particular, it focuses on the species and density of the understory plants on tip-ups. The understory plants shorter than 1 m were sampled on mounds and the adjacent undisturbed forest floor microsite. In preliminary results, the two microsites have a similar number of species, but the average species richness and total plant cover on the mounds is greater than the undisturbed forest floor by p-values of .00011 and 4.6e-7, respectively. These results suggest that mounds provide a more productive and diverse habitat for understory plants. The positive role of tip-up mounds in the forest should be taken into account during post-storm salvage logging operations, which often destroy these important structural changes. Hurricanes are predicted to increase in frequency and severity with climate change. As such, understanding how these events affect our forests can help us prepare anticipate the influence of these events on understory plant community structure and diversity.

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