Effects of fuels reductions on plant communities and soils in a Piñon-juniper woodland

Impacts of Mastication: Soil Seed Bank Responses to a Forest Thinning Treatment in Three Colorado (USA) Conifer Forest Types

“…Forest thinning treatments can elicit a variety of vegetation responses depending on the method used [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. As mastication deposits the plant biomass on the forest floor instead of removing it from the system, a physical barrier may be present and potentially altering seed bank compositions.…”

“…While highly variable in their ecological responses, mastication treatments often create an open canopy allowing for the inclusion of light, enhance soil moistures and increase plant available N and vegetation cover [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]49], which in turn increase the potential for seed rain and overall storage in the seed bank. Through understanding soil seed bank compositions we can begin to predict the potential future of the aboveground vegetation community and effects of a forest thinning treatment on the vegetation community as a whole.…”

“…A heterogeneous deposition of masticated materials, or mulch, can lead to variable responses in understory plant cover [18][19][20][21][22][23]. At stand level scales, such as over an entire thinning project, mulching has been shown to increase plant diversity and cover due to an increase in light and the maintenance and enhancement of soil moisture [16,18,20].…”

“…However, when looking at the system at a finer spatial scale (e.g., m2), the heterogeneity of forest floor fuel depths can have a range of positive and negative effects on the understory vegetation community [16,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Yet defining a vegetation community solely as the active aboveground composition is often incomplete as other species may be waiting to emerge from the belowground seed bank following environmental or structural shifts [25] such as a fuel thinning treatment.…”

Human Land-Use and Soil Change

“…The degree to which these activities affect soil change is primarily dependent on the amount that the soil is disturbed during implementation and project success in altering species composition (e.g., woody to herbaceous) or abundance. Woody species removal (in fuel treatments or for range improvements) can increase the amount of woody litter incorporated into soils (Ross et al 2012). Treatments that increase herbaceous cover and productivity may be associated with a multitude of changes to soil quality (van Auken 2000).…”