RT Journal Article
T1 Tree Age Distributions Reveal Large-Scale Disturbance-Recovery Cycles in Three Tropical Forests
A1 Vlam, Mart
A1 Sleen, Peter Van der
A1 Groenendijk, Peter
A1 Zuidema, Pieter
K1 Dendroecology
K1 Forest disturbance
K1 Regeneration failure
K1 Tree age distribution
K1 Treerings
K1 Tropical forest
AB Over the past few decades there has been a growing realization that a large shareof apparently ‘virgin’ or ‘old-growth’ tropical forests carries a legacy of past naturalor anthropogenic disturbances that have a substantial effect on present-day forestcomposition, structure and dynamics. Yet, direct evidence of such disturbances isscarce and comparisons of disturbance dynamics across regions even more so. Herewe present a tree-ring based reconstruction of disturbance histories from three tropicalforest sites in Bolivia, Cameroon, and Thailand. We studied temporal patterns in treeregeneration of shade-intolerant tree species, because establishment of these trees isindicative for canopy disturbance. In three large areas (140–300 ha), stem disks andincrement cores were collected for a total of 1154 trees (>5 cm diameter) from 12 treespecies to estimate the age of every tree. Using these age estimates we producedpopulation age distributions, which were analyzed for evidence of past disturbance.Our approach allowed us to reconstruct patterns of tree establishment over a period ofaround 250 years. In Bolivia, we found continuous regeneration rates of three speciesand a peaked age distribution of a long-lived pioneer species. In both Cameroon andThailand we found irregular age distributions, indicating strongly reduced regenerationrates over a period of 10–60 years. Past fires, windthrow events or anthropogenicdisturbances all provide plausible explanations for the reported variation in tree ageacross the three sites. Our results support the recent idea that the long-term dynamicsof tropical forests are impacted by large-scale disturbance-recovery cycles, similar tothose driving temperate forest dynamics.
PB Frontiers Media
YR 2017
FD 2017-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/15935
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/15935
LA eng
NO Vlam, M., van der Sleen, P., Groenendijk, P., & Zuidema, P. A. (2017). Tree Age Distributions Reveal Large-Scale Disturbance-Recovery Cycles in Three Tropical Forests. Frontiers in plant science, 7, 1984
NO This study was financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC, grant #242955). The paper is derived from the work done in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a PhD degree of the first author (MV) at Wageningen University (Vlam, 2014)
DS Minerva
RD 27 abr 2026