Achieving successful and adequate regeneration is one of the primary goals of forest management and forest restoration. Regeneration is a crucial life stage in plant demography. Change in regeneration success is viewed as an indicator that resilience to disturbance may be altering within a system. The regeneration stage is most sensitive to climatic variability and thus to climate change. A recent study found that climate change in the western USA is impacting tree regeneration following wildfire as critical thresholds for aridity have been crossed. Increases in aridity has resulted in a decline in seedling densities, increased regeneration failure and declines in forest resilience. Declines in seedling recruitment can lead to changes in stand composition and density that place forest strands on development trajectories that may vary drastically from historic patterns. This management of South eastern Australian forest is termed as clear-fell, burn and sow system, which has been extensively practiced in the temperate wet forests of Victoria since 1950s. The amount of seed dispersed per ha is ~200,000. With this amount, a stand is considered successfully stocked if recruitment of the targeted species count leads to more than 3000 stems per hectare for target eucalypts species. Since 1993 the information about the harvested area treated for regeneration has been collected. For this study, amalgamated information about regeneration surveys of harvested coupe covering a range of environmental conditions providing an excellent database from 2002 onwards was used to explore the role of climate, topography and soils on recruitment success and abundance in the temperate eucalypt forests of southeast Australia.
Results/Conclusions
This study brings together unique finding about regeneration of harvested coupe in Australia and broader concept how these regenerations will be affected by future change in climate. Across three forest type, precipitation seems to be most important factor for the recruitment of the species followed by temperature and then by topographical factors. E. regnans forest had 85% influence from climatic variable followed by HEMS with 80% and E. delegatensis having 75 % relative influence respectively. Climatic factor such as temperature always has direct effect on the growth of the species. Our knowledge of the regeneration of plants species in harvested coupe is highly dependent on the density of the species but with the change in climate the density dependent management practice need to change and with fire being the biggest existing hazard in the area.