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Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance

We used bioproxies from paleosoils buried within two aeolian dunes to test hypotheses concerning the origin of dry sandy boreal forests in Canada. These forests are dominated today by Pinus banksiana Lamb. One hypothesis is that too frequent Holocene stand-replacing fires would have transformed the...

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Autores principales: Carcaillet, Christopher, Desponts, Mireille, Robin, Vincent, Bergeron, Yves
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7410099/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32831628
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10021-019-00455-w
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author Carcaillet, Christopher
Desponts, Mireille
Robin, Vincent
Bergeron, Yves
author_facet Carcaillet, Christopher
Desponts, Mireille
Robin, Vincent
Bergeron, Yves
author_sort Carcaillet, Christopher
collection PubMed
description We used bioproxies from paleosoils buried within two aeolian dunes to test hypotheses concerning the origin of dry sandy boreal forests in Canada. These forests are dominated today by Pinus banksiana Lamb. One hypothesis is that too frequent Holocene stand-replacing fires would have transformed the original vegetation through extirpation of susceptible species to fire in water stress habitat. Alternatively, the ecosystem would have not changed since the dunes stabilized enough to support forest establishment. The vegetation composition and richness were determined by identification of charcoal and macroremains and radiocarbon dating for the chronology. Both sites revealed a similar history covering 6400 years. Half of the charcoal layers were less than 2500 years old in both sites, indicating that they had been subjected to the same fire history. Data indicated a stable plant composition and richness, although the percentage of Pinus decreased slightly over 4000 years (decreasing rate 1% per century). The fungus Cenococcum geophilum was consistently present, with a stochastic abundance. The vegetation grew under natural fire conditions and soil dryness since 6000 years. The ecosystem was probably not stressed by late-Holocene fires or climate changes, as the multi-millennial steady state reveals a resistant and resilient ecosystem. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10021-019-00455-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-74100992020-08-17 Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance Carcaillet, Christopher Desponts, Mireille Robin, Vincent Bergeron, Yves Ecosystems Article We used bioproxies from paleosoils buried within two aeolian dunes to test hypotheses concerning the origin of dry sandy boreal forests in Canada. These forests are dominated today by Pinus banksiana Lamb. One hypothesis is that too frequent Holocene stand-replacing fires would have transformed the original vegetation through extirpation of susceptible species to fire in water stress habitat. Alternatively, the ecosystem would have not changed since the dunes stabilized enough to support forest establishment. The vegetation composition and richness were determined by identification of charcoal and macroremains and radiocarbon dating for the chronology. Both sites revealed a similar history covering 6400 years. Half of the charcoal layers were less than 2500 years old in both sites, indicating that they had been subjected to the same fire history. Data indicated a stable plant composition and richness, although the percentage of Pinus decreased slightly over 4000 years (decreasing rate 1% per century). The fungus Cenococcum geophilum was consistently present, with a stochastic abundance. The vegetation grew under natural fire conditions and soil dryness since 6000 years. The ecosystem was probably not stressed by late-Holocene fires or climate changes, as the multi-millennial steady state reveals a resistant and resilient ecosystem. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10021-019-00455-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer US 2019-10-30 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7410099/ /pubmed/32831628 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10021-019-00455-w Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Carcaillet, Christopher
Desponts, Mireille
Robin, Vincent
Bergeron, Yves
Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title_full Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title_fullStr Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title_full_unstemmed Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title_short Long-Term Steady-State Dry Boreal Forest in the Face of Disturbance
title_sort long-term steady-state dry boreal forest in the face of disturbance
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7410099/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32831628
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10021-019-00455-w
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