Abstract ID: 3.12871 | Accepted as Poster | Poster | TBA | TBA

Large forest disturbances from insect outbreaks are a major concern in the context of global changes. The preservation of countless forest ecosystem services, especially in mountain areas, depends a lot on the post-disturbance management strategies. It has been shown in mountain spruce forests that, even if clustered, natural regeneration is high enough to discard the sowing/transplanting option to favor forest recovery. However, the mechanisms that shape this clustering remains underexplored. On the one hand, dead wood such as lying logs, debris or stump is commonly assumed to support natural regeneration providing herbaceous competition free microhabitats. However, field observations tend to lower down the regenerative role of these seedlings due to their extremely slow growth. On the other hand, tree base, as the area surrounding standing trunks are very specific microhabitats of the forest floor susceptible to shape the regeneration clustering. Here, we hypothesized that the microclimate of these tree bases, and in particular the tree wells associated with irregular snow cover could be a major driver of the regeneration spatial distribution. We tested this hypothesis using a high-resolution monitoring of the microclimate and regeneration dynamics in the natural coniferous forests in the Šumava Mts., Czech Republic. In particular, we explored the correlation between the non-growing season microclimate regimes and regeneration survival. Moreover, as such microclimatic configurations can be associated with living trees as well as with standing dead trunks, we compared the different types of stands and assessed the relevance of dead trunks preservation as post-disturbance management strategy.