Do Appalachian Herbaceous Understories Ever Recover from Clearcutting?
. The following is an abstract from a study by David Cameron Duffy and Albert J. Meier at the Institurte of Ecology at the University of Georgia. The study appeared in Conservation Biology, Volume 6, No. 2, June 1992. Thanks to Dr.Frosty Levy of East Tennessee State University for bringing this study to my attention. For those who wish to see the full study and dont have access to this journal, send a SASE to the editor for a copy. Abstract: Life history characteristics of many herbaceous understory plants suggest that such species recover slowly from major perturbations such as clear cutting We examined herbaceous cover and richness in the understories of nine primary (“old- growth “) forests in the southern Appalachian foundations and of nine comparable secondary forests, ranging in age from 45 to 87 years since clear cutting. Neither cover nor richness increased with age in the secondary forests. This suggests three possibilities: (1) that recovery is so slow or variable among sites
