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Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2018

• Title: Shifting species dominance: Is red maple the new red oak?
• Author: Emilio J Arias (Emory University)
• Abstract:

  In eastern North American forests, red maple has replaced the once-dominated oaks. However, oaks continue to dominate permanent plots at the Harvard Forest. In 1984 Craig Lorimer hypothesized that red maple would overtake red oak once they are released from suppression in the understory. Lorimer created life tables that display changes in diameter class of red maple and concluded that red maple was likely to become increasingly important. In a similar fashion, I created updated life tables for both red maple and red oak for the plots in Lorimer’s analysis, to examine whether red maple has progressed to the overstory as predicted. Analysis of these tables indicate that red oak continues to have a larger proportion of trees in the overstory while red maple is more prevalent in the understory. Additionally, red oak diameter growth was higher than red maple, and few red maples ascended to the overstory in the past 40 years. The Harvard Forest plots have experienced very low canopy disturbance in the past 50 years and it is unclear whether red maple will retain the capacity to grow into the canopy when disturbance occurs. Timber harvest is the largest cause of adult tree mortality in the northeast. Therefore, extending this study to analyze pre- and post- harvest plot data can showcase to what extent removal of red oak in the canopy allows the understory red maple to gain dominance.

• Research Category: Physiological Ecology, Population Dynamics, and Species Interactions; Large Experiments and Permanent Plot Studies