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Journal of Arid Land  2015, Vol. 7 Issue (6): 841-851    DOI: 10.1007/s40333-015-0015-2
Brief Communication     
Changes of forest fire regime and landscape pattern under different harvesting modes in a boreal forest of Northeast China
CHEN Hongwei1,2*, HU Yuanman2, CHANG Yu2, BU Rencang2, LI Yuehui2, LIU Miao2
1 Liaoning Key Laboratory of Urban Integrated Pest Management and Ecological Security, Shenyang University, Shenyang 110044, China;
2 State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110164, China
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Abstract  Forest management such as timber harvesting shapes fire regimes and landscape patterns, and these patterns often differ significantly from those under natural disturbances. Our objective was to examine the effects of timber harvesting modes on fire regimes and landscape patterns in a boreal forest of Northeast China. We used a spatially explicit landscape model, LANDIS, to simulate the changes of forest landscape in the Hu-zhong forest region of the Great Khingan Mountains under no-cutting, clear-cutting, gradual-cutting and se-lective-cutting modes. Results showed that: (1) the fine fuel loadings generally decreased while the coarse fuel loadings increased with the increase of timber harvesting intensity; (2) the potential burn area significantly varied among different cutting modes, but the potential fire frequency had no obvious difference. Moreover, timber harvesting generally increased the potential fire risk; (3) clear-cutting mode significantly decreased the mean patch size and the aggregation of larch forests and increased the mean patch size and the aggregation of white birch forests. Therefore, clear-cutting mode should be abandoned, and selective-cutting mode be recommended for the sustainable forest management in the Great Khingan Mountains.

Key wordssand shadow dune      morphology      aeolian landform      wind tunnel      Qinghai-Tibet Plateau     
Received: 24 October 2014      Published: 10 December 2015
Fund:  

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (41201185, 31070422, 41271201), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05050201) and the Agricultural Science and Technology Research Projects Founda-tion of Shenyang (F13-146-3-00)

Corresponding Authors:
Cite this article:

CHEN Hongwei, HU Yuanman, CHANG Yu, BU Rencang, LI Yuehui, LIU Miao. Changes of forest fire regime and landscape pattern under different harvesting modes in a boreal forest of Northeast China. Journal of Arid Land, 2015, 7(6): 841-851.

URL:

http://jal.xjegi.com/10.1007/s40333-015-0015-2     OR     http://jal.xjegi.com/Y2015/V7/I6/841

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