Treesearch

Howell's montia (Montia howellii S. Watson), a tiny annual plant with a California Rare Plant Rank of 2.2 (rare in California but more common elsewhere), is found throughout its range in seasonally wet, natural and disturbed habitats. On Humboldt Redwood Company timberlands it occurs on native surface or lightly rocked roads and turnouts, and in wet meadows used by cattle. We examined the spatial and temporal extent of Howell's montia on 10 road complexes over 6 years by counting the plants in consecutive fixed 10 meter segments of road. Using GIS event routing, we documented the changes...

The 'pygmy forest' is a specialized community that is adapted to highly acidic, hydrophobic, nutrient deprived soils, and exists in pockets within the coast redwood forest in Mendocino County. While coast redwood is known as an exceptionally tall tree, stunted trees exhibit unusual growth-forms on pygmy soils. We used a stratified random sampling procedure to characterize forest composition, structure, and growth-form, across the pygmy/redwood ecotone. Results indicate that tree height, canopy cover, basal area, herbaceous cover, shrub height and cover, and the dominance of pygmy forest...

Late-seral conditions in redwood forests are becoming a management goal on some timberlands. However, published information is rare regarding the structure of late-seral forests upon which silvicultural prescriptions can be guided, or upon which to measure success. Old-growth forests—those perceived to be near or at the successional climax—are the ultimate model. Yet, old-growth forests are a rare commodity in Mendocino County, limited mostly to state parks and small stands on private lands. Their rarity yields a poor sampling of the variation among stands, making historic sources of...

Fog inundates the coast redwood forests of northern California frequently during the summer months (May to September) when rainfall is largely absent (Azevedo and Morgan 1974, Byers 1953, Oberlander 1956). This maritime fog modifies otherwise warm and dry summer climate by increasing humidity, decreasing the air temperature, reducing solar radiation, and contributing water to the ecosystem through leaf wetness and fog drip (Fischer et al. 2008, Grubb and Whitmore 1966, Hutley et al. 1997, Williams et al. 2008). Fog water provides an important water subsidy for redwood forest plants that...

The management of second-growth coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forests for the purpose of restoration and ecological conservation is a growing trend. However, little is known about the long-term regenerative potential of this forest type in the absence of postharvest management techniques such as thinning and planting. Data were collected on a chronosequence of second-growth sites (18 to 127 years) and three old-growth reference sites in order to characterize changes in stand structure and composition over time. A total of 360 plots on 18 sites with minimal post-harvest treatment...

Little is known about belowground biomass and carbon in tanoak. Although tanoaks rarely provide merchantable wood, an assessment of belowground carbon loss due to tanoak removal and Sudden Oak Death will inform conservation and management decisions in redwood-tanoak ecosystems. The carbon content of woody biomass is a function of density and the proportion of carbon in dry biomass. Whole-tree basic wood density or specific gravity estimates are often available to facilitate calculation of forest biomass, and contemporary carbon analyses generally assume that carbon comprises 50 percent of...

Soil microorganisms perform critical ecosystem functions, including decomposition, nitrogen (N) mineralization and nitrification. Soil temperature and water availability can be critical determinants of the rates of these processes as well as microbial community composition and structure. This research examined how changes in climate affect bacterial and fungal community structures and rates of N mineralization and nitrification in coast redwood forest soils. Soils were reciprocally transplanted between three redwood sites located across a latitudinal climate gradient, from near the...

Old growth and second growth populations of coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) were sampled at 10 locations throughout its range and analyzed at a highly variable chloroplast microsatellite locus. Very low FST values indicated that there was no significant genetic differentiation between adjacent old growth and second growth populations at each location. Genetic diversity was moderate to high in populations north of the San Francisco Bay but low to very low in more southerly populations. Phylogenetic analysis produced a neighbor-joining tree with one clade composed of all populations...

We quantified structural attributes in three alluvial flat old-growth coast redwood stands. Tree size parameters and occurrences of distinctive features (e.g., burls, goose pens) were similar between stands. Occurrence of distinctive features was greater among larger trees. Tree sizefrequency distributions conformed to a reverse-J diameter distribution. The range of tree sizes was similar between study sites. Redwood density ranged from 118 to 148 trees ha-1 and upper canopy tree density ranged from 45 to 74 trees ha-1. Crown ratio was similar across study sites with an overall mean of...

Fog water deposition is thought to influence the ecological function of many coastal ecosystems, including coast redwood forests. We examined cation and anion inputs from fog and rain, as well as the fate of these inputs, within a Sonoma County, California, coast redwood forest to elucidate the availability of these ions and some of the biotic and abiotic processes that may influence their relative abundance. At this site, the patterns of water and chemical inputs via fog and rain and their movement through the soil-plant ecosystem differed between the summer fog and winter rain seasons....