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Land use history (1840-2005) and physiography as determinants of southern boreal forests

Summary

Published in Landscape Ecology 29: 437-450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-013-9974-x

Land use history has altered natural disturbance dynamics, causing widespread modifications of the earth’s forests. The aim of this study is to reconstruct a regional, spatially-explicit, fire and logging history for a large southern boreal forest landscape (6,050 km2) of eastern Canada. We then examined the long-term influence of land use history, fires, and physiographical gradients on the area’s disturbances regimes, present-day age structure and tree species composition. Spatially-explicit fire (1820–2005) and logging (1900–2005) histories were reconstructed from forestry maps, terrestrial forest inventories and historical records (local newspapers, travel notes, regional historical reviews). Logistic regression was used to model the occurrence of major boreal tree species at the regional scale, in relation to their disturbance history and physiographical variables. The interplay of elevation and fire history was found to explain a large part of the present-day distribution of the four species studied. We conclude that human-induced fires following the colonization activities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have increased fire frequency and the dominance of fire-adapted species at lower elevations. At higher elevations, the low historical fire frequency has fostered the dominance of fire-sensitive species. Twentieth-century forestry practices and escaped settlement fires have generated a forest landscape dominated by younger forest habitats than in presettlement times. The expected increase of wildfire activity in North America’s eastern boreal forest, in conjunction with continued forest management, could have significant consequences on the resilience of boreal forests.

Sector(s): 

Forests

Categorie(s): 

Scientific Article

Theme(s): 

Forest Ecology, Forestry Research, Forests

Departmental author(s): 

Auger, Isabelle, Boucher, Yan, Grondin, Pierre

Author(s)

BOUCHER, Yan, Pierre GRONDIN and Isabelle AUGER

Year of publication :

2014

Format :

Paper

Keywords :

feu, empreinte des perturbations, patrons de végétation, colonisation, coupe forestière, écologie historique, article scientifique de recherche forestière, écologie forestière, forest ecology, fire, disturbance legacy, vegetation pattern, settlement, logging, historical ecology

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