Survival and growth of Fagus crenata seedlings in relation to biological and microtopographical factors in a cool temperate broadleaf forest

ABSTRACT

The seedling stage is critical in the life cycle of trees, and performance is controlled by both abiotic and biotic factors, which are spatially heterogeneous. We investigated the relationships between the seedling survival or growth of Fagus crenata and seven potentially influencing factors (culm density of dwarf bamboo, slope angle, topographic convexity, distance from the nearest conspecific adult, and local density of F. crenata seedlings, and seedling size and age), under consideration of the changes in direction and strength of the microtopographic effects across space. In 2011, we identified all F. crenata seedlings (maximum stem length <50 cm) within a 90 × 30-m plot in a cool-temperate forest in western Japan and then recorded their survival and growth of stem length in 2012. The best model based on Akaike’s information criterion indicated that the size, age, and distance had positive effects on the survival while slope and convexity had negative effects, and that the strength of the negative effect of convexity varied spatially even within our plot. Meanwhile, the size and culm density had positive and negative effects on the growth, respectively. These results suggest that F. crenata seedlings have more chance to survive at the site on a gentle slope with planar or relatively concave undulations, where the conspecific adults stood apart, and that the seedlings show higher growth rate at the sites without dense dwarf bamboo. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spatially nonstationary effect of microtopography controls the spatial pattern of seedling survival.

KEYWORDS:

• Beech forest
• distance-dependent mortality
• dwarf bamboo
• microtopography
• semi-parametric GWGLM

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the village of Nishiawakura for providing permission to perform the study in the Wakasugi Forest Reserve. We thank members of the Forest Ecology and Physiological Plant Ecology departments at the University of Okayama for help with data collection. An associate editor and anonymous reviewers improved this paper substantially.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Funding

Y.A. was funded by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research: [Grant Number 15J0000717] from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.