Long-term plots
- Site
- Storbäcken old-growth reserve
- Years
- 1998 - present
- Funder
- Nordvik University
- Role
- Principal investigator since 2004
3 frames on this sheet
My doctorate, and the thing I am still asked about most. In the autumn of 1998 my supervisor felled and marked 180 Picea abies logs across three stands, weighed each one, took a density core, and left them on the forest floor. I inherited them in 2004 and have been going back ever since.
The decay curve turned out to be far less tidy than the textbooks draw it. Logs of identical size and species, a few metres apart, can differ in mass loss by a factor of three after twenty years, and the thing that predicts the difference is not moisture or temperature but which fungus got there first. That result took a decade of data before it was defensible.
Sixty-one of the original logs are still identifiable. The rest have become soil, which is also a measurement.
