Unfolding the effects of different forestry treatments on microclimate in oak forests: results of a 4‐yr experiment

Abstract

A stable below‐canopy microclimate of forests is essential for their biodiversity and ecosystem functionality. Forest management necessarily modifies the buffering capacity of woodlands. However, the specific effects of different forestry treatments on site conditions, the temporal recovery after the harvests, and the reason for the contrasts between treatments are still poorly understood. The effects of four different forestry treatments (clear‐cutting, retention tree group, preparation cutting, and gap‐cutting) on microclimatic variables were studied within a field experiment in a managed oak‐dominated stand in Hungary, before (2014) and after (2015–2017) the interventions by complete block design with six replicates. From the first post‐treatment year, clear‐cuts differed the most from the uncut control due to the increased irradiance and heat load. Means and variability of air and soil temperature increased, air became dryer along with higher soil moisture levels. Retention tree groups could effectively ameliorate the extreme temperatures but not the mean values. Preparation cutting induced slight changes from the original buffered and humid forest microclimate. Despite the substantially more incoming light, gap‐cutting could retain the cool and humid air conditions and showed the highest increase in soil moisture after the interventions. For most microclimate variables, we could not observe any obvious trend within 3 yr. However, soil temperature variability decreased with time in clear‐cuts, while soil moisture difference continuously increased in gap‐ and clear‐cuts. Based on multivariate analyses, the treatments separated significantly based mainly on the temperature maxima and variability. We found that (1) the effect sizes among treatment levels were consistent throughout the years, (2) the climatic recovery time for variables appears to be far more than 3 yr, and (3) the applied silvicultural methods diverged mainly among the temperature maxima. Based on our study, the spatially heterogeneous and fine‐scaled treatments of continuous cover forestry (gap‐cutting, selection systems) are recommended. By applying these practices, the essential structural elements creating buffered microclimate could be more successfully maintained. Thus, forestry interventions could induce less pronounced alterations in environmental conditions for forest‐dwelling organism groups.

Quantitative and qualitative approaches to assess tree vigor and stand health in dry pine forests

“…Although water balance was slightly improved during the drought in L HE, this improvement was not reflected in an increase in BAI (Table 3). Denser patches of trees or even tree adjacency may improve tree water status through reduced windspeeds, increased relative humidity and reduced evaporation in clusters of crowns, as demonstrated among different silivicultural treatments (Kovács et al, 2019). Lowland stands on toeslopes unresponsive to moderately severe drought may not persist without risk in extreme and or prolonged droughts (see Van Gunst et al, 2016).…”

Effects of litter and root manipulations on soil carbon and nitrogen in a Schrenk’s spruce (Picea schrenkiana) forest

“…Imbalanced soil nutrients can inhibit microbial activity. Alternatively, the soil is exposed to intense light and rain when the litter is removed [66], creating suboptimal or lethal conditions for soil microorganisms, possibly damaging the mycelium structure [67]. Given that soil microorganisms are closely associated with the production of enzymes [68], the soil enzyme activity is correspondingly reduced with the decrease in soil microorganisms.…”

Bandwidth Control Mechanism and Extreme Gradient Boosting Algorithm for Protecting Software-Defined Networks Against DDoS Attacks

“…The over-sampling method mainly involves increasing the size of an imbalanced dataset by duplicating the minority instances of some classes for equal distribution among the classes. The synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is the most widely used type of over-sampling method [43].…”