Within human-dominated temperate landscapes, small deciduous forests comprise the majority of habitat available to the plant and animal diversity dependent on the structure and environment created by trees. Such landscapes are home to 25% of the world’s population in areas of Asia, Europe, and much of the eastern US. These regions bring together extremely high human population densities, and resulting impacts, and many small forests. Our question: how do soil contamination and nonnative plant invasion impact ecosystem health in forests fragments across the urban-rural gradient? To initiate the establishment of a dispersed network of small study forests, we selected sites in small forests along an urban-rural gradient in the Mid-Atlantic and southeastern US. These plots form the long-term research program we named FRAME (Forest Fragments in Managed Ecosystems).
Results/Conclusions
Plots were successfully established using a GRITS protocol. Additionally, we performed an analysis of the "Megalopolis" region of the eastern US and enumerated and measured the sizes of all temperate deciduous forests in that region (approximately 251,000). In our 38 forest sites we measured soil chemistry, volume of leaf litter and coarse woody debris, percent ground cover, stem density of woody plants, and tree basal area in at least 10 subplots per forest. Correlations in Cu and Zn concentrations in the soil were seen with an increase in road density. Leaf litter and nonnative plant density were negatively correlated.