Trade-offs between competition and facilitation: a case study of vegetation management in the interior cedar–hemlock forests of southern British Columbia.

Vegetation-management practices are applied in temperate-zone forests on the assumption that changing the competitive environment between conifers and unwanted vegetation will improve conifer productivity. We review this assumption using research examining interactions between paper birch (Betula papyrifera Marsh.) and conifers in the highly productive Interior Cedar Hemlock zone of British Columbia. We have found that both competition and facilitation are important in young plantations, where paper birch competes for light, reducing growth of shade-intolerant conifers, but having a facilitative effect on shade-tolerant conifers. This facilitative effect may result from greater ectomycorrhizal diversity, population sizes of Armillaria ostoyae (Romagn.) Herink antagonistic bacteria, and associative nitrogen fixation in plantations where interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca (Beissn.) Franco) is mixed with paper birch. Where paper birch is manually cut or girdled, conifers grow faster in diameter, but more die as a result of A. ostoyae root disease, and these responses increase with increasing weeding intensity. The weeding treatments do not affect plant community species richness but reduce paper birch dominants and increase understory structural diversity. British Columbia forest policy has been slow to respond to these findings, and we suggest that as a result, the forested landscape incurs substantial risk. We propose additional pathways for managing Interior Cedar Hemlock mixtures to ensure that the natural mix of forest types in the landscape is maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]