A new scientific article by CEF PhD student Paulo Firmino seeks to understand the relationship between soil and topographical conditions in tree growth.
The scientific article “How do soil and topographic drivers determine tree diameter spatial distribution in even aged cork oak stands installed in average to high productivity areas” is one of the works carried out during the PhD studies of Paulo Firmino (ForChange group), a student at the Forest Research Centre (Centro de Estudos Florestais – CEF), in partnership with members of the companies Agro Analítica and Área400. This article was also co-authored by ForChange researchers Margarida Tomé and Joana Amaral Paulo, and ForEco researcher Manuel Campagnolo.
The article spatially analyses and models the importance of soil and physiographic conditions in the development of individual tree diameter in young cork oak plantations. The authors mapped the soil and topographic variables from four even-aged and even-spaced cork oak plantations located in two climatically distinct Portuguese regions.
The major goal of this research was to understand the relation between soil and topographic fine-scale conditions and tree growth expressed by diameter without cork annual growth (idu). The methodology consisted in (1) analysing the spatial variability and autocorrelation of idu; (2) modelling idu with ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions; (3) comparing with spatial modelling of idu, incorporating spatial autocorrelation.
The article was published in the journal New Forests and can be found here.