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Spatial patterns of large wood debris in the northern interior of British Columbia

University of British Columbia

Large woody debris (LWD) patterns were investigated in 18 streams in the Interior of British Columbia for a variety of stream sizes (1.4-13.7 m bankfull width flow) and forest types (SBS and SBPS BEC Zones). Definition and scaling type for LWD are variable in the published literature. This research reported that both the definition used to define LWD and the scaling technique used to analyze and display LWD affected the results in LWD abundance and volume measures. Although LWD varies by forest type and stream size, the effect of the riparian forest on LWD loading was minimal compared to the effect of stream size for the 18 study sites. Stream characteristics were such as bankfull flow width and depth were identified as predictor variables for LWD abundance and volume. The distribution of LWD was different in wood associated with LWD jams than wood free in the stream. The importance of LWD jams increased relatively with stream size. LWD jams (1) were larger, (2) had an increasingly different distribution of LWD size classes, and (3) had a different distribution of position and orientation classes than free wood with increases in stream size. The patterns observed in the distribution of LWD for orientation and position classes as well as piece size was consistent with the literature: (1) perpendicular wood generally decreased while parallel increased with stream size; (2) bridged wood decreased while wood fully in the bed increased and (3) piece size generally increased with stream size.

Text

2010-04-09

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23341

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/