Forests provide fundamental ecosystem services. Environmental changes are predicted to affect forest growth directly through increased environmental stressors, and indirectly by amplifying disturbance. To increase our understanding of effects of environmental changes and disturbance on Afromontane forest growth, we used tree-ring data collected from Juniperus procera trees from church forests in the northwest highlands of Ethiopia. We used structural change models to detect structural shift in growth trends. We applied Linear Mixed Effect Models (LMM) to compare growth rate differences between successive tree generations. The running mean method and radial growth pattern analysis were used to detect disturbance events. Three groups of generations were identified based on Basal Area Increment (BAI) rates. There are significant differences (χ2 = 204.64, P
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2017.12.015Altmetric score:
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Publication year
2018
Authors
Abiyu, A.; Mokria, M.; Gebrekirstos, A.; Bräuning, A.
Language
English
Keywords
growth rings
Geographic
Ethiopia
