Download or read book Simulation Modeling of the Effects of Disturbance on Forest Structure and Nutrient Cycling in the Lake Tahoe Basin written by Sarah Lynne Karam and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In water limited forests with frequent fire, it is hypothesized that fire related ecosystem fluxes may exceed water related fluxes. Because conventional sawlog harvesting primarily removes nutrient poor wood from the ecosystem, it may not have the same importance as fire to nutrient cycling, even through it can have similar effects on forest composition and age structure. We developed NuCycling-Succession, a nutrient cycling extension for the LANDIS-II landscape model of forest dynamics, to examine the influence of fire and biomass harvesting regimes on nutrient cycling at multiple spatial scales in the Lake Tahoe Basin. NuCycling-Succession represents the continuum of decomposition and associated changes in chemistry using annual cohorts of leaf and fine root litter. This formulation may provide a more realistic representation of decomposition dynamics and their interactions with disturbances that affect the forest floor, like fire, than that in most nutrient cycling models. Considering the dominance of fire-related nutrient cycling dynamics under particular environmental conditions, forest management that incorporates fire may more effectively reduce the masses of nutrient pools and restore nutrient cycling dynamics to their pre-settlement conditions than management based on biomass harvesting.