Effect of clear-felling and harvest residue removal on nitrogen and phosphorus export from drained norway spruce mires in southern finland

PUBLISHED Calibration-period/control-area approach was used to study nitrogen and phosphorus export from drained and productive Norway-spruce-dominated peatland forests follow- ing conventional stem-only and whole-tree harvesting. The study indicated high nitrogen and particulate phosphorus exports...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: XIAO, LIWEN
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2262/77383
http://people.tcd.ie/lxiao
Description
Summary:PUBLISHED Calibration-period/control-area approach was used to study nitrogen and phosphorus export from drained and productive Norway-spruce-dominated peatland forests follow- ing conventional stem-only and whole-tree harvesting. The study indicated high nitrogen and particulate phosphorus exports and lack of significant differences between the harvest treatments during the first 3–4 years after harvesting. The high extra nitrogen exports, increasing to a maximum level of about 10 kg ha–1 during the third year after harvesting, were partly caused by the higher nitrate export than in previous studies. The study has a practical outcome that management of harvest residues (i.e. left on site or harvested) may not be an efficient means of mitigation of nitrogen and phosphorus exports. The high exports following harvesting underline the importance of using the best available water protection methods, such as sufficiently large wetland buffer areas, to decrease nutrient exports to watercourses from productive Norway spruce dominated peatland catchments.