Professor Lucy Hutyra and PhD candidate Luca Morreale published in Nature Communications
Earth & Environment Professor Lucy Hutyra and Graduate Student Fellow at the Hariri Institute & PhD candidate Luca Morreale, in collaboration with scientists from Harvard Forest and The City University of New York, found that trees along the edges of temperate forests grow faster and denser as a result of fragmentation–in contrast to their tropical forest counterparts.
In the abstract of their article, Elevated growth and biomass along temperate forest edges, published in Nature Communications, they write:
“Fragmentation transforms the environment along forest edges. The prevailing narrative, driven by research in tropical systems, suggests that edge environments increase tree mortality and structural degradation resulting in net decreases in ecosystem productivity. We show that, in contrast to tropical systems, temperate forest edges exhibit increased forest growth and biomass with no change in total mortality relative to the forest interior. We analyze >48,000 forest inventory plots across the north-eastern US using a quasi-experimental matching design. At forest edges adjacent to anthropogenic land covers, we report increases of 36.3% and 24.1% in forest growth and biomass, respectively. Inclusion of edge impacts increases estimates of forest productivity by up to 23% in agriculture-dominated areas, 15% in the metropolitan coast, and+2% in the least-fragmented regions.We also quantify forest fragmentation globally, at 30-m resolution, showing that temperate forests contain 52% more edge forest area than tropical forests. Our analyses upend the conventional wisdom of forest edges as less productive than intact forest and call for a reassessment of the conservation value of forest fragments.”
Read their article here