skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 11:00 PM ET on Friday, September 13 until 2:00 AM ET on Saturday, September 14 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: On the Locality of Nash-Williams Forest Decomposition and Star-Forest Decomposition
Award ID(s):
2008422
NSF-PAR ID:
10426105
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
Volume:
37
Issue:
2
ISSN:
0895-4801
Page Range / eLocation ID:
800 to 830
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. This data set documents the temporal and spatial variation of soil and deadwood moisture, and nearby microclimate, for the a four-month period from June to October 2018. These data were gathered as part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES). The HBES is a collaborative effort at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, which is operated and main tained by the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
  3. Wood decomposition is regulated by multiple controls, including climate and wood traits, that vary at local to regional scales. Yet decomposition rates differ dramatically when these controls do not. Fungal community dynamics are often invoked to explain these differences, suggesting that knowledge of ecosystem properties that influence fungal communities will improve understanding and projection of wood decomposition. We hypothesize that deadwood inputs decompose faster in forests with higher stocks of downed coarse woody material (CWM) because CWM is a resource from which lignocellulolytic fungi rapidly colonize new inputs. To test this hypothesis, we measure decomposition of 1,116 pieces of fine woody material (FWM) of five species, incubated for 13 to 49 months at five locations spanning 10°-latitude in eastern U.S. forest. We place FWM pieces near and far from CWM across observational transects and experimental common gardens. Soil temperature positively affects location-level mean decomposition rates, but these among-location differences are smaller than within-location variation in decomposition. Some of this variability is caused by CWM, where FWM pieces next to CWM decompose more rapidly. These effects are greater with time of incubation and lower initial wood density of FWM. The effect size of CWM is of the same relative magnitude as for the known controls of temperature, deadwood density and diameter. Abundance data for CWM is available for many forests and hence may be an ecosystem variable amenable for inclusion in decomposition models. Our findings suggest that conservation efforts to rebuild depleted CWM stocks in temperate forests may accelerate decomposition of fresh deadwood inputs. Please see the associated manuscript for the Methods. All files are in .txt or .csv format and so can be opened with common, open-source software. The file named 'README_BradfordetalCWMproximity.txt' describes the uploaded files. 
    more » « less