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MOFEP Ground Flora Study. Team Members: Jenny Grabner, Randy Jensen, Eric Zenner, John Kabrick, David Larsen, and others. Project Goals . Determine pre-treatment differences among sites, treatments, and blocks with respect to: ground flora species, plot diversity, and plot richness.
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MOFEP Ground Flora Study Team Members: Jenny Grabner, Randy Jensen, Eric Zenner, John Kabrick, David Larsen, and others.
Project Goals • Determine pre-treatment differences among sites, treatments, and blocks with respect to: • ground flora species, plot diversity, and plot richness. • Detect patterns in the ground flora data in relation to environmental conditions both within and among sites. • Document changes in ground flora vegetation following even-age, uneven-age, and no-harvest management.
Key findings: Pre-treatment • 530+ different species, including 275 genera in 85 families • > 50% of species on less than 10% of the 648 plots • Plots averaged high species diversity • low and high species richness and species diversity within plots of all sites • species composition and abundance, and plot richness and diversity were dependent on: • geology, landform, and soils, within and among sites
Key findings: Post-treatment • species richness decreased on no-harvest sites but increased slightly on even-age and uneven-age sites • ground cover (%) increased on all sites and treatments but harvested sites increased more than no-harvest sites • annual / biennial species increased increased the most on even-age management sites: • The post-treatment relative cover (%) was 1% or less on all sites • relative cover (%) of woody vines increased the most on the even-age and uneven-age sites • legumes decreased significantly on harvested sites but increased slightly on no-harvest sites
Ground flora richness difference Even-aged Uneven-aged No-harvest Group openings Single-tree selection Uncut Intermediate cuts Clearcuts Uncut
% Ground cover difference Even-aged Uneven-aged No-harvest Group openings Single-tree selection Uncut Intermediate cuts Clearcuts Uncut
Past Challenges • Lots of quadrats (10,368) to sample in a short time. • Lots of data and lots of species to analyze. • Lots of plant taxonomy training and a learning curve through the years. • Treatments, sites, elts, new elts, eltps, soils, cut or not cut – how to put it all together
Research Needs • A botanist on MOFEP ! • Determining the number of years sampling is required before and after the next 2011 harvest. • Is an additional sampling design desired to detect differences of forest management on rare species? • A quadrat level treatment header for the difference between single-tree and group selection harvests. • Individual species analysis. • Better understanding of how scale and patch dynamics affects forest ground flora.
Future Plans ???