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AN INDICATOR OF POTENTIAL STREAM WOOD CONTRIBUTION FOR RIPARIAN FORESTS
Citation:
Ringold, P L., M. A. Bollman, J. R. Barker, AND J. Welty. AN INDICATOR OF POTENTIAL STREAM WOOD CONTRIBUTION FOR RIPARIAN FORESTS. Presented at Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, Snowbird, UT, August 6-10, 2000.
Description:
In northwestern Oregon a key function of riparian forests is to provide wood to the stream network. This function is a prominent feature of Federal and State forest practices in the region. Thus, defining indicators which are associated with this function are important for designing and implementing riparian monitoring. This study is based on field observations of 110 riparian forest plots in western Oregon. We compare model predictions of potential stream wood from these 40m x 40m plots to sets of simple field observations. The results show that tree number and tree basal area are strongly associated with model predictions. The results also examine the effect of the spatial scale of the field measures. Here, the results show that one component of stream wood (total number of pieces) is strongly associated with model predictions for the full 40m x 40m plot (r2 > .7 with one woody debris model) even while for another component large conifers model predictions are strongly associated (r2 > .9) with field measures when the field measure is taken over a greater distance from the stream (e.g. 30 to 40m). The analysis also identifies conditions for which these associations are weaker.