Forest Ecosystem Processes  > Effects of Environment and Management on Forest Ecological Processes

Today's forest managers are asked to focus on biodiversity and maintenance of ecosystem health while continuing to produce forest commodities. An overriding consideration is the promotion of ecosystem processes that sustain healthy forest ecosystems. Knowledge to support management decisions will require improved mechanistic understanding of forest ecology.

We need to understand processes that change ecosystem dynamics because they are the most effective tools available to land managers who are asked to maintain or restore forest health. Important ecological processes in the Interior West include competition (for nutrients, water, and light), allelopathy, soil genesis, fire, animal damage, nutrient cycling, carbon accumulation and release, and ecological genetics.

Understanding genetic structure is basic knowledge for implementing biologically sound programs dealing with breeding, reforestation, or conservation biology. Genetic structure also determines responses to changing conditions regardless of whether change is induced by management, lack of management, fluctuating climatic gradients, or global warming.

Mission: Develop a coordinated understanding of basic ecological processes that regulate growth and productivity of forests, and how forests develop with and without management.


Major Projects:

• Silvicultural treatments that alter wood decay rates to reduce accumulation of woody biomass
• New techniques to increase the proportion of seral species
• Quantifying light estimates and canopy structure from readily collected inventory data
• Physiological responses of ponderosa pine to thinning
• Effects of light environment on seedling development
• Genetic vs. environmental controls of tree growth
• Genetic studies for spruces, subalpine fir, and Southwest pines
• Determine climatic factors controlling the distribution of genotypes across the landscape
• Water use efficiency in conifers
• Investigations on volcanic ash soils--nutrient responses, pH changes, deficiencies and excesses, and hydrophobicity