Key message

We found that the stabilizing mechanisms for forest productivity varied across harvesting intensities in a mixed broad-leaved Korean pine forest. Effects of overyielding at high species richness and species asynchrony occurred only in unharvested and lightly harvested plots, whereas asymmetries between individuals of different size contributed significantly to stabilizing productivity when harvestings became intensive.

Context

Understanding the driving factors of forest ecosystem stability has become increasingly crucial in forest management. However, it remains unclear whether and how the stabilizing mechanisms of forest productivity might be influenced by management practices.

Aims

We related the temporal stability of aboveground biomass productivity to harvesting history. We further tested how three key driving mechanisms of stability might be modulated by selective harvesting intensities.

Methods

Based on a 10-year monitoring (five repeated tree inventories) of a mixed broad-leaved Korean pine forest in Northeastern China recovering from selective harvesting, we examined the relative importance of two diversity-dependent mechanisms (overyielding and species asynchrony) and one size-dependent mechanism (asymmetric growth) for productivity stability across a wide range of intensities (0–73.4% basal area removed).

Results

We found that selective harvesting significantly lowered the productivity stability, species asynchrony, and growth dominance coefficient. Growth dominance coefficient had an overall stronger effect on stability than species richness and asynchrony. Moreover, the strengths of stabilizing mechanisms varied across harvesting intensities: effects of overyielding at high species richness and species asynchrony were detected only in unharvested and lightly harvested plots, whereas the explanatory power of growth dominance coefficient outweighed the diversity-related variables when harvesting became intensive.

Conclusions

We emphasized the importance to consider both diversity- and size-related explanatory variables as potential mechanisms for the temporal stability of forest productivity. In fact, how growth is partitioned among trees of different species as well as sizes may co-determine the response of forest stability to disturbances.