Abstract:
The Appalachian extensions of the boreal forest or taiga, dominated by balsam fir, red spruce, and white birch extends down the slop of the green mountains to about 2,600 ft, where it merges with the Eastern Deciduous Forest dominated by sugar maple, beech, and yellow birch. These two forest formations occur as well developed horizontal bands on the mountains with a distinctive tension zone forest between them. In this mid-slope forest the species of neither the deciduous nor boreal forest are able to form well-developed long lived stands
The contact between the deciduous and boreal forest is climatically, not edaphically, controlled. The current vegetation and soil development is the result of long term effects of a vertical climatic discontinuity expressed as a nonlinear decline in the length of the frost-free period across the mid-slope transitional forest and as a marked increase in the frequency of the cloud base at and above ca 792 m. This results in......
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Approximate Word Count: 2745
Approximate Pages: 11 (260 words per double-spaced page) |