Tornados can cause immense damage to natural vegetation, and in doing so, alter the carbon storage capacity of ecosystems. Wind disturbances convert damaged sites into carbon sources rather than carbon sinks. As a great amount of carbon is stored in southeastern US forests, alterations to the carbon storage of these sites can affect the global carbon cycle. Humans may further impact natural disturbances through salvage logging, which may decrease carbon accumulation and impact forest recovery. Using a Georgia Piedmont forest which experienced a tornado and subsequent salvage logging in 2011, we aim to answer the following questions:
(1) How does the amount of carbon storage differ between intact forest, tornado disturbed, and tornado disturbed & salvage logged areas?
(2) How does disturbance type affect canopy tree recovery?
To investigate these questions, we compared the biomass, coarse woody debris volume, and average soil respiration between the three conditions using ANOVA. We compared mean canopy tree recovery, number of new canopy trees post-disturbance, between tornado disturbed and tornado disturbed & salvage logged conditions using ANOVA. The comparisons of means will be evaluated using Tukey’s honest significance test.
Results/Conclusions
Biomass was significantly lower in the tornado and tornado & salvage logged conditions than in the intact forest (p<0.001; p<0.001). Coarse woody debris was significantly higher in the tornado condition than in the intact forest (p=0.004) or the tornado & salvage logged condition (p=0.005). Finally, soil respiration did not show consistent patterns for the four samples taken, but tornado disturbed and tornado & salvage logged conditions trended towards higher carbon dioxide efflux than intact forest plots. There was no significant relationship between disturbance type and canopy tree recovery (p=0.31).
Carbon storage differed between the intact forest, tornado disturbed, and tornado disturbed & salvage logged plots for each carbon cycle component. While there was no significant difference between disturbance type and canopy tree recovery, areas with tornado & salvage logging trended towards having fewer new canopy trees than tornado-only sites. This research will lead to greater understanding of the processes of forest carbon recovery after disturbance, generating predictions about the impact of disturbance on carbon storage in these sites. Predicting the effects of natural disturbances on ecosystem carbon storage is crucial in the face of climate change and can help managers prioritize sites and make decisions to promote forest ecosystem recovery.