Stand Dynamics of Aspen, Lassen National Forest, Northern California
Andrew Pierce
The project that I am working on is related to the fire history project in the Diamond Mountains of Lassen National Forest. I am studying the competitive interactions of conifers and aspen in pure and mixed stands. For this project, I intensively mapped and cored trees in 5 pairs of 625m2 plots between 1900m and 2100m in elevation on north facing slopes. These plots controlled for topographic variables (elevation and aspect) while allowing for variation in composition. These plots will allow me to investigate spatial patterns, and competitive interactions between trees. They will also allow me to test some of the predictions made by the theories of asymmetric and symmetric competition. The tentative title of my final project is “The Spatial Expression of Interspecific Competition in Mixed aspen-conifer Stand in Lassen National Forest, California, U.S.A” To implement simple models using spatial variables (distance between trees, area available per tree), I am developing a framework in R (www.r-project.org) that takes advantage of R’s powerful statistical backbone and its flexibility as a programming language.
This project was supported with funding from the National Forest Service
