Bumper seed years help young rowan trees survive under their parents
Barbara S, Michał B, Łukasz P, Jan H, Mateusz L
Native Plants
If you're growing mountain ash or rowan from seed, or hoping wild seedlings will fill in under an existing tree, the year the seeds were produced can change how many of them make it.
Researchers tracked nearly 4,700 rowan seedlings in a Carpathian mountain forest for 15 years. Seedlings growing under a rowan parent usually did worse than those under spruce, but seedlings born in years with huge berry crops did much better under rowans than those from poor years. A big seed year seems to produce tougher seedlings, which lets more of them survive close to the parent tree.
Key Findings
The study followed 4,678 individually marked rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) seedlings for 15 years in a subalpine spruce forest in the West Carpathians.
Annual survival rose with seedling age and leaf area, and was higher beneath heterospecific spruces than beneath conspecific rowans.
Under rowan crowns, seedlings from high-crop years survived better than those from low-crop years, while survival under spruce changed little with crop size, reducing the conspecific survival disadvantage in mast years.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Rowan seedlings that sprout in big seed years survive better under their parent trees than seedlings from lean years. Bumper crops soften the usual penalty of growing in the shade of a same-species adult, so more young trees can persist close to their parents.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Mast seeding mitigates the negative demographic effects of conspecific adults on rowan seedling survival.
Seedling mortality filters tree recruitment, yet we know little about whether the year in which a seedling is produced leaves a demographic signal after emergence. This gap is central for mast-seed...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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