Today, we are going to look at the development of a single cohort stand. A single cohort is a stand of trees that become established within 10 years of each other. After a major disturbance in which all trees in the local area are killed, that region will (usually) go through four stages, which we will learn about in this lecture. Stand initiation, stem exclusion, understory re-initiation, and old growth.
Read moreLecture 13: Spatial Variation in Vegetation Patterns
In today's lecture, we are going to at how topography, (elevation, slope aspect, latitude, rain-shadows, microtopography) soil properties, and disturbance helps describe the spatial patterns we see in vegetation. We will better understand the emergent landscape and how natural selection selects for plant communities that compete the least with each other. These spatial and temporal interactions are quite complex and are applied differently in every ecosystem on this planet, but hopefully, by the end of the lecture, we will be able to better understand forest ecology from the perspective of the forest floor.
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