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Abstract
Thousands of kilometers of dozer lines are plowed each year to suppress fires on national forest lands. The recolonization and recovery process of these disturbed landscapes is not well studied and may differ across regions. In spring 2021, a dozer line was constructed through a botanically diverse, high-quality shale woodland-glade plant community on the Ouachita National Forest, AR, to suppress a 10-ha spot-over from a prescribed burn. We installed two 100-m transects in the dozer line and identified all plant species in quadrats along each transect. We compared these transects to undisturbed plant community monitoring transects that were collected from the same communities near the dozer line. While some of the area revegetated within the first growing season, the quality of plant community (determined by their coefficients of conservatism, or C-values) was lower in the dozer line than surrounding woodland-glade and several nonnative species increased in their frequency of occurrence within the dozer line. These results highlight the importance of monitoring these disturbed areas because it enables early detection and control of nonnative invasive species and helps to better understand ecological effects of management activities.
Parent Publication
Citation
McDaniel, Virginia L.; De Jong, Gabriel L.; Schalk, Christopher M. 2024. Plant Succession Following Dozer Line Installation Through a Shale Woodland Glade on the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas. In: Bragg, Don C.; Oswald, Brian P.; Koerth, Nancy E., eds. Proceedings of the 22nd biennial southern silvicultural research conference. Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS-274. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station: 239–256. https://doi.org/10.2737/SRS-GTR-274-Pap38.
