Elsevier

Rangelands

Volume 38, Issue 6, December 2016, Pages 350-356
Rangelands

Case Study
Provisional, Forested Ecological Sites in the Northern Appalachians and Their State-and-Transition Models

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rala.2016.10.005Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

On the Ground

  • The identification of unique areas of vegetative potential across the Northern Appalachians is complicated by a long land-use history of vegetation management.

  • We introduce provisional ecological sites and associated state-and-transition models for the region, which can be differentiated by latitudinal drivers of: precipitation and temperature; local parent material and resulting soil differences; and landscape position, slope, or aspect.

  • Identification of ecological sites and associated States or Phases in the Northern Appalachians provides land managers with quantifiable benchmarks for assessing forest compositional shifts due to natural or anthropogenic disturbance.

Keywords

forest
ecological site
Appalachian

Cited by (0)

Funding for this research was supported by the United State Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Soil Science Division and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Forestry.

1

Ireland, was Postdoctoral Researcher, APSS, Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, The Pennsylvania State University when research was conducted.