Achievement

Research conducted by three former and current BART trainees and several BART affiliated faculty members from various universities was submitted to Global Change Biology. Luke Nave and Brady Hardiman (focusing on plant ecophysiology and biogeochemical cycles) and Kyle Maurer (focusing on the effects of tree-scale structural heterogeneity on flux exchanges and atmospheric surface layer properties) quantified changes in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) biogeochemistry following a disturbance in which early-successional trees give way to later-successional species. Two years after treatments were started, the effect of disturbance on N leaching and the decline in net ecosystem CO2 exchange were rather small, indicating that this type of subtle disturbance has fundamentally different consequences for resilience of forest productivity and N retention than severe disturbances such as clear-cutting or burning.