A dendroecological reconstruction of disturbance in an old-growth Fagus-Abies forest in Slovenia

The scarcity of large old-growth forests has made it challenging to quantify disturbance regimes in Central Europe. The objective of this study was to reconstruct the history of disturbance in an old-growth Fagus-Abies forest reserve in Slovenia using a dendroecological approach. We extracted cores from canopy trees blown down during a recent windthrow event and identified growth releases in the tree-ring series using boundary-line release criteria to infer past disturbances. A total of 216 release events were identified from 88 trees. Between 1790 and 1990, moderate, asynchronous release events were present in nearly every decade of the disturbance chronology, suggesting a history of frequent, low severity disturbance. However, there were also peaks in the chronology corresponding to synchronous release events in a large proportion of the trees, suggesting that less frequent, intermediate severity disturbance events played an important role in forest development. These events are likely caused from wind damage associated with local thunderstorms, which seem to occur at intervals between 20-80 years on the study site. Thus, in addition to the small-scale gap phase processes operating in the forest, the results indicate that periodic intermediate severity disturbance events are an important component of the disturbance regime in mountain forests of Central Europe.