DOI: 10.5061/dryad.tqjq2bvwz
title: A 249-year chronosequence of forest plots from eight successive fires in the eastern Canada boreal mixedwoods

description: A combination of wildfires and defoliating insect outbreaks play an
 important role in the natural successional dynamics of North American
 boreal forests, which, in the long term, change the post-disturbance
 composition and structure of forest stands. After stand-replacing
 disturbances (mainly wildfires), early successional hardwoods typically
 dominate the affected areas in boreal forests. Provided sufficient time
 following disturbances, the increasing recruitment of mid- to
 late-successional softwoods as well as the mortality of hardwoods
 gradually change forest composition from hardwoods to admixtures of
 hardwood-conifer species and conifer-dominated stands in mid and late
 successional stages, respectively. Such mixed woods are abundant across
 the southern Canadian boreal forest. In boreal Canada, mixed woods are the
 most structurally heterogeneous forest ecosystems, are highly productive,
 and form an important source of timber supply. Here we present the EASTERN
 BOREAL MIXEDWOODS CANADA dataset, which documents the changes in
 composition and structure of stands originating from eight successive
 wildfires representing a chronosequence of 249 years in eastern Canada.
 This dataset has been used in several different projects to study and
 model the influence of natural (e.g., insect outbreaks) and anthropogenic
 disturbances (e.g., harvesting) on the dynamics of post-fire stands. The
 data covers a high range of variability in stand composition and
 structure, explained by species establishment, dominance and mixture. It
 thus constitutes a useful source of information to trace the dynamics of
 the main boreal tree species of eastern north America, from their
 establishment to their replacement at different spatial scales (e.g., from
 stand to landscape level).
description: <em>Note: Detailed methods will be described in forthcoming
 data paper.</em> The dataset
 integrates data from inventories conducted during 1990-2019 period
 throughout the Lake Duparquet Research and Teaching Forest (LDRTF),
 located in the balsam fir - white birch bioclimatic domain of Québec
 (Canada), where a dozen of large wildfires occurred since 1760 (Bergeron
 1991). Within the LDRTF site, the EASTERN BOREAL MIXEDWOODS CANADA data
 have been collected in three main subsets that cover different study
 objectives that contribute to a better understanding of post-fire stand
 successional dynamics: 
  LDRTF-TRANSECTS: These transects represent a network
 of 596 quadrats that covers the stands originated from eight wildfires
 that occurred from 1760 to 1964 (1760, 1797, 1823, 1847, 1870, 1916, 1944
 and 1964). The original idea of establishing the quadrats in 1990-1991 was
 to study the compositional and structural variability of post-fire stands
 and changes over time, first with a chronosequence analysis (Bergeron and
 Dubuc 1989) and then by a stand-reconstruction approach (Bergeron 2000).
 The other objective of establishing the plots were to study the
 interaction between post fire stand composition and secondary disturbances
 (Kneeshaw and Bergeron 1998). The quadrats were re-sampled in 2009 and
 were used in several studies, for example for parametrizing the SORTIE-ND
 forest simulator to simulate the natural successional dynamics of
 post-fire stands in LDRTF over long periods, both in presence and in
 absence of natural and anthropogenic disturbances (Poulin et al. 2007,
 Poulin and Messier 2008, Leduc and Coates 2013, Bose et al. 2015, Maleki
 et al. 2020). 
 LDRTF-SEEDLING_PLOTS: In each post-fire stand (1760,
 1797, 1823, 1847, 1870, 1916, 1944 and 1964) a 400
 m<sup>2</sup> plot was stablished in 1997 to observe annual
 seedling recruitment and mortality in 16 one-m<sup>2</sup>
 subplots located near the plot borders. 
 LDRTF-HECTARES: In six of the post-fire stands (1760,
 1823, 1847, 1870, 1916 and 1944) a one-hectare permanent plot was first
 established in 1991 and re-measured in 4-6 years intervals. One of the
 goals to establish this data was to study the spatial patterns, age
 structure and growth of species in each stand (Park et al.
 2005).
description: The README.txt file contains the description of all tables and
 variables in the data.