Dynamik dichter, gleichförmiger Gebirgsfichtenwälder

Dynamics of dense, uniform spruce-dominated mountain forests Dense, uniform stands have increased in spruce-dominated mountain forests during the last century and often cause silvicultural problems. During recent years, different research activities at Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have addressed the development of such mountain forests with or without active management. For this, plots of the Swiss National Forest Inventory (NFI) between 1983/1985 and 2004/2006 have been analysed, dendroecological methods have been used to investigate competition and selfthinning processes and a reassessment of WSL long-term investigation plots has been conducted. NFI plots of stands which have already been dense during the first inventory period generally showed increasing basal area, stagnating stem numbers, strongly increasing amounts of deadwood and slightly increasing regeneration levels, both in managed and in unmanaged stands. Dendroecological field studies confirm that tree...