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Wind protection rather than soil water availability contributes to the restriction of high-mountain forest to ravines

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Abstract

Tropical and subtropical high-mountain forests are often restricted to ravines, with forest presence being rare in other topographies such as ridges. We tested the hypothesis that this distribution is partly due to increased soil water content and/or protection from winds in ravines as compared to ridges. We planted 396 saplings of the dominant tree species in a three-factor experiment that included topography (ridge/ravine), wind protection (protected/unprotected) and water addition (watered/not watered). We monitored wind speed and soil water content for one complete annual cycle and sapling survival and growth for 27 months. Sapling survival presented marginally significant differences for topography, being slightly greater in ridges than in ravines (0.88 and 0.78, respectively), with no significant differences for wind protection or water addition treatments. By contrast, sapling growth was considerably reduced in ridges as compared to ravines (16.1 and 26.0 cm, respectively); the wind protection treatment showed a significant positive effect on growth (saplings grew 25.5 and 16.5 cm with and without wind protection, respectively), whereas the water addition treatment had no effect. Importantly, saplings under wind protection treatment in ridges had similar growth to that of unprotected saplings in ravines, and growth difference due to the wind protection treatment was positively correlated with wind intensity, suggesting that reduced wind impact in ravines is an important abiotic factor that promotes forest occurrence in ravines.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the joint binational program CONICET (Argentina)—DFG (Germany). We thank Eduardo Salinas for permission to perform the study in his property. We are very grateful to volunteers that helped during planting and watering, and with the maintenance of the fence, especially A.J. Gonzalez and M.A. Fuhr-Ahumada. We benefited from discussions with M.L. Herrero and E.G. Verga. Numerous comments and improvements to our manuscript were performed by R. Torres, D.S. Argibay and A.M. Cingolani. D. Snyder and J. Brasca improved the English style.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola, Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía, Física y Computación (CONICET - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), Av. Medina Allende s/n, X5000HUA, Córdoba, Argentina

    J. Sparacino

  2. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas y Tecnológicas, Centro de Ecología y Recursos Naturales Renovables (CONICET - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), Av. Velez Sarsfield 1611, X5016GCA, Córdoba, Argentina

    D. Renison

  3. Laboratorio Ecotono, INIBIOMA (CONICET - UNCOMA), Pasaje Gutiérrez 1125, 8400, Bariloche, Argentina

    A. M. Devegili

  4. Proyecto de Conservación y Reforestación de las Sierras de Córdoba, Ortiz de Ocampo 741, Río Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina

    R. Suarez

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  1. J. Sparacino
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Correspondence to J. Sparacino.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

See Figs. 5 and 6.

Appendix 2

See Table 3.

Table 3 Number of saplings that were alive in March 2017 that had never been recorded as browsed and that were used for re-analyzing the data set without the possible confounding influence of browsing
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Appendix 3

See Table 4.

Table 4 Results of generalized linear mixed models for growth (assuming a normal distribution) of P. australis saplings, testing the effect of fixed factors: topography, water addition treatment (WaT) and wind protection treatment (WiT), as well as all possible double and triple interactions, and including microsite conditions (sun exposure, slope inclination, soil depth, vegetation cover and vegetation height) as covariates
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Sparacino, J., Renison, D., Devegili, A.M. et al. Wind protection rather than soil water availability contributes to the restriction of high-mountain forest to ravines. New Forests 51, 101–117 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11056-019-09722-z

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