Forests always experience frequent natural disturbances, which have important and beneficial long-term effects on diversity maintenance. However, occasional extreme climatic events (i.e. ice storm) can cause catastrophic damage on plant diversity and species composition directly or indirectly by shifting the competitive balance among coexisting species. To evaluate the extent to which such disturbance will influence forest dynamics, we use community-wide long-term seedling census data in GTS to investigate how such an ice-storm happened in early 2008 affects the seedling composition, diversity and their response to neighborhood interactions.
Results/Conclusions
Our study indicated that, although ice storm could significantly change neighborhood interaction on seedling survival in the seedling community in short-term (< 2 years), its effect diminished in a longer term. However, ice storm increased the density and diversity of the seedling community, which would increase the forest tree diversity in the long term. Our study suggests that extreme climate event such as ice storms could also benefit forest diversity maintenance.