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Forestry Advance Access originally published online on August 22, 2007
Forestry 2007 80(4):455-469; doi:10.1093/forestry/cpm024
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© Institute of Chartered Foresters, 2007. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Estimates of decay rates of components of coarse woody debris in thinned Sitka spruce forests

Brian Tobin*, Kevin Black, Luke McGurdy and Maarten Nieuwenhuis

UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

* Corresponding author. E-mail: brian.tobin{at}ucd.ie


  Abstract

The requirement for reporting of changes in forest carbon (C) stocks under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the Kyoto Protocol has underlined a need for information on the deadwood pool. As the coarse woody debris (CWD) component of the deadwood pool falls outside the remit of most C-stock change models used in reporting processes, this study set out to develop a methodology to evaluate the C-content of CWD stocks in the main Irish forest type (Sitka spruce plantations). In order to calculate CWD stocks without information on thinning/harvesting dates, the development of a system of classifying CWD into five decay classes (DCs) is presented. DCs were based mainly on visual characteristics linked to the degree of decomposition. Samples were taken from thinned first rotation plantations to establish the basic density loss associated with each DC. Stocks, including logs, stumps and roots, ranged from 5.1 to 13.1 t C ha–1 in forests aged 30 and 33 years, respectively. Decay rates for both stump and log material were 0.0592 and 0.0466 g cm–3 a–1, respectively.

Received 20 December 2006.
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