Growth and chemical composition of silver birch: Comparative study between Lithuania and Romania
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Growth and chemical composition of silver birch: Comparative study between Lithuania and Romania Valda Araminienė1 · Lucian Dinca2 · Iveta Varnagirytė– Kabašinskiene1 · Raluca Enescu2 · Vlad Crisan2 · Vidas Stakėnas1
Received: 8 May 2020 / Accepted: 27 June 2020 © Northeast Forestry University 2020
Abstract The effects of different climatic conditions on growth and chemical composition of Betula pendula in geographically different European regions, Lithuania and Romania, were compared. Birch species in the entire area have a wide natural distribution, but B. pendula is commercially more important in Lithuania than in Romania. Here we evaluated tree ring width, wood density and foliar chemical composition of mature birch trees in two European regions. Trees at the Lithuanian sites had greater radial growth and wood density with no clear changes in foliar chemistry than those at the Romanian sites. Mean wood density was 600– 700 kg m−3 at Lithuanian and 350–450 kg m−3 at Romanian sites. Mean width of wood ring, earlywood and latewood for Lithuanian birch trees were several times higher than the means for Romanian birch trees. We hypothesized that the main differences in birch radial growth and wood density were due to the different climatic conditions in the studied regions. Ca, K and Mg concentrations were significantly higher and Fe and Mn were lower in the birch foliage at the Lithuanian sites compared those at the Romanian sites. Overall assessment of growth showed that silver birch Project funding: This work was supported financially by Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology, Lithuania. The online version is available at http://www.springerlink.com Corresponding editor: Zhu Hong * Valda Araminienė [email protected] 1
Institute of Forestry, Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Liepų str. 1 Girionys, 53101 Kaunas district, Lithuania
2
The National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry “Marin Drăcea”, Cloșca str. 13, Brașov, Romania
cultivation is more appropriate for colder climate regions and that birch growth may change in the context of a warming climate. Keywords Betula pendula · Ring width · Ood density · Foliage chemistry
Introduction Climate change is expected to increasingly affect the species composition of Central European forests (Lindner et al. 2014; Wohlgemuth 2015) through significant effects on biological processes and plant life cycles and functions (Norby and Luo 2004). Physiological changes in plants, caused by climatic phenomena, change the chemical composition of foliage and litterfall, and, therefore, can affect soil nutrient cycle and ecosystem productivity. Changes in the composition of older leaves caused by climatic factors (Top and Filley 2014; Suseela et al. 2015) can affect the activity of detritivory (Currano et al. 2008; Couture et al. 2012), which will have an impact on carbon and nutrient cycling in soils (Aerts 1997; Liu et al. 2009; Suseela et al. 2013). Furthermore, these processes can affect the ov
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