Complex Historical Disturbance Regimes Shape Forest Dynamics Across a Seasonal Tropical Landscape in Western Thailand

Abstract

The seasonally dry tropical forests of continental Southeast Asia occur in landscape-scale mosaics composed of several distinct forest types. The current understanding of the role of disturbances, such as fire and wind storms, in shaping these landscapes and the individual forest types within them, is limited by a lack of historical data. In this chapter we present the first dendroecological reconstruction of the historical dynamics of a mixed deciduous forest in western Thailand and compare it to an earlier study of the historical dynamics of an adjacent area of seasonal evergreen forest. The tree-ring data from the mixed deciduous forest demonstrate pulses of widespread gap recruitment sin..