Woody Plant Recovery in a Southern Appalachian Quercus Stand 12 Years after Wind Disturbance and Salvage Logging

Compound forest disturbances may alter forest successional and developmental pathways differently than a single disturbance alone; however, this is not a certainty. We investigated effects of post-wind disturbance salvage logging, a common compound disturbance sequence, in an upland Quercus stand on the Alabama Cumberland Plateau 12 years after the events. We re-established 60 sample plots in undisturbed, wind-disturbed, and compound-disturbed (wind-disturbed and salvage logged) neighborhoods of a single stand that was first inventoried two years post-disturbance. Sapling density was greatest and seedling density was lowest on compound-disturbed plots. Over the 12 growing seasons since the wind disturbance and salvage logging events, the woody plant assemblages became more diverse and heterogeneous within disturbance categories. On wind-disturbed and compound-disturbed plots, we suspect this was related to reorganization of the woody plant assemblage and arrival of new propagules. On undisturbed plots, we speculated this pattern resulted from gap-scale disturbance processes as the Quercus alba stand approached the complex stage of development. In 2012, the wind-disturbed and compound-disturbed woody plant assemblages were distinct in ordination space, but by 2022 the wind-disturbed and compound-disturbed plots were no longer statistically distinct in ordination space. However, the sapling layer of compound-disturbed neighborhoods was heavily dominated by Acer rubrum and we hypothesized that the wind disturbance event accelerated succession of Quercus-to-Acer and that the salvage operation accelerated the composition shift.