Condition of Live Fire-Scarred Ponderosa Pine Trees Six Years after Removing Partial Cross Sections
Affiliation
USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory, Missoula, MTUSDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Seattle, WA
Issue Date
2001
Metadata
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Copyright © Tree-Ring Society. All rights reserved.Collection Information
This item is part of the Tree-Ring Research (formerly Tree-Ring Bulletin) archive. It was digitized from a physical copy provided by the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at The University of Arizona. For more information about this peer-reviewed scholarly journal, please email the Editor of Tree-Ring Research at editor@treeringsociety.org.Publisher
Tree-Ring SocietyJournal
Tree-Ring ResearchCitation
Heyerdahl, E.K., McKay, S.J. 2001. Condition of live fire-scarred ponderosa pine trees six years after removing partial cross sections. Tree-Ring Research 57(2):131-139.Abstract
Our objective was to document the effect of fire-history sampling on the mortality of mature ponderosa pine trees in Oregon. We examined 138 trees from which fire-scarred partial cross sections had been removed five to six years earlier, and 386 similarly sized, unsampled neighbor trees, from 78 plots distributed over about 5,000 ha. Mortality was low for both groups. Although mortality was significantly higher for the sectioned trees than their neighbors (8% versus 1 %), removing a partial section did not appear to increase a tree's susceptibility to death from factors such as wind or insect activity. Specifically, the few sectioned stems that broke did so well above sampling height. Most sectioned trees (79 %) had evidence of insect activity in 1994/95, while only an additional 5% had such evidence in 2000. Mortality among sectioned trees in this study was low probably because we removed relatively small sections, averaging 7 cm thick and 8% of the tree's cross-sectional area, from large trees of a species with effective, resin-based defenses against insects and pathogens. Sampling live ponderosa pine trees appears to be a non-lethal method of obtaining information on past fire regimes in this region because it only infrequently led to their death in the early years after sampling.ISSN
2162-45851536-1098