Vegetation state and extreme drought as factors determining differentiation and succession of Carabidae communities in forests damaged by a windstorm in the High Tatra Mts

Abstract

Succession of Carabidae communities in spruce forests in the High Tatra Mts damaged by the windstorm of November 2004 exhibited two trends. The first trend includes the communities differentiation according to the state and management of damaged sites into three groups: (1) the site with fallen timber in situ shows only quantitative and reversible changes in rapport to the intact stand, (2) the sites with extracted timber, where less tolerant forest species disappeared, more tolerant forest species were favored and non-forest mountain species appeared, (3) the sites with extracted timber, additionally burned in July/August 2005, where number of the forest species and their abundance declined and temporal invasions of xenocoenous open-landscape species occurred. This differentiation is explained by autecology of individual species and state of vegetation. In 2010, the communities in burned and unburned sites started to converge due to partial restoration of the vegetation cover, but they continued to strongly differ from the site with timber in situ. The second trend includes a striking decline of the number of species and individuals and cumulative biomass in all sites in 2008 and a slow increase of these parameters up to 2011. The extreme dry summer of 2012 caused a decline of these parameters about to the levels from 2009. This trend represents a long lasting consequence of the extremely dry year 2007 and an immediate response to the drought in 2012. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI24) and Standardized Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI24) fitted best these changes. © 2013 Versita Warsaw and Springer-Verlag Wien.