Introduction:
Have you ever wondered what western mixed conifer forests would look like without fire suppression tactics? A reduction in fire suppression would allow mixed conifer forests to burn at one severity instead of multiple severities, such as in the School Forest. The School Fire in 2005 burned at different severities across the 21,000 ha of land near Pomeroy, Washington. The fire burned at three different severity levels: low, medium, and high. These three levels impacted the 21,000 ha differently and allowed different numbers of plants and trees to survive or regenerate depending on the severity of the fire and the fire adaptations each plant or tree species possess. Some salvage logging was done after the fire occurred and other areas were re-seeded with native grasses to reduce erosion and …show more content…
This could be due to high severity sites having no over-story competition present. Low severity sites are going to have more shade tolerant species present and over-story competition which will cause these trees to grow at slower rate due to greater water and nutrient uptake (H2).
There are limitations to this data collected. Errors in collecting data from multiple students can be messy. Field data can also be entered wrong or mis-understood. One example of interpreting field instructions wrong would be: the transect width for sites LLL and MLL were six meters wide, while site HLL was also required to be a six meter wide transect many groups sampled a two meter wide transect for HLL. (Two meter wide HLL site data was removed from the data analysis. Only six meter wide data was used in this report).
In the future I would like collect more data to explore growth patters with shade tolerant and intolerant species on the LLL site. I would like to track their future growth patterns and limits, to observe changes in the density per meter^2 and the total number of stems, over
Have you ever wondered what western mixed conifer forests would look like without fire suppression tactics? A reduction in fire suppression would allow mixed conifer forests to burn at one severity instead of multiple severities, such as in the School Forest. The School Fire in 2005 burned at different severities across the 21,000 ha of land near Pomeroy, Washington. The fire burned at three different severity levels: low, medium, and high. These three levels impacted the 21,000 ha differently and allowed different numbers of plants and trees to survive or regenerate depending on the severity of the fire and the fire adaptations each plant or tree species possess. Some salvage logging was done after the fire occurred and other areas were re-seeded with native grasses to reduce erosion and …show more content…
This could be due to high severity sites having no over-story competition present. Low severity sites are going to have more shade tolerant species present and over-story competition which will cause these trees to grow at slower rate due to greater water and nutrient uptake (H2).
There are limitations to this data collected. Errors in collecting data from multiple students can be messy. Field data can also be entered wrong or mis-understood. One example of interpreting field instructions wrong would be: the transect width for sites LLL and MLL were six meters wide, while site HLL was also required to be a six meter wide transect many groups sampled a two meter wide transect for HLL. (Two meter wide HLL site data was removed from the data analysis. Only six meter wide data was used in this report).
In the future I would like collect more data to explore growth patters with shade tolerant and intolerant species on the LLL site. I would like to track their future growth patterns and limits, to observe changes in the density per meter^2 and the total number of stems, over