Browsing by Subject "Forest management"

Fungi play an important role, especially in boreal coniferous forests and peatlands. For example, they are responsible for the circulation of nutrients, and are an important part of forest vegetation, such as tree function and nutrient uptake. Drainage of peatlands for silvicultural purposes has increased over the years and forest management has been found to change the structure of fungal communities. In addition to clear-cutting (CC) as one of the forest management methods, the method of continuous cover forestry (CCF) has been proposed as one of the possible forest management methods, but its effects on the soil fungal community have not been extensively studied. The aims of this master's thesis were to study how the active soil fungal community and its structure vary between the different forest management methods (CC, CCF and uncut control forest) of the peatland forest in Janakkala and between the seasons (spring, summer and autumn). The active community was studied by taking RNA samples from the area in May, July, and September 2021. In addition, the goal was to examine how potential environmental factors such as soil temperature and groundwater variations affect the active fungal community. Overall, diversity was higher in the autumn in all samples. The most stable area was the control forest, where active community members varied between seasons, but where biodiversity was similar between samples in both spring and autumn. The results of the CCF site followed in many ways the uncut forest, but in the autumn, there were large differences in the biodiversity and community structure of the samples in the forest of the CCF site. The biodiversity of the CC area was high. This may be explained by the deforestation of young trees already formed at the time of sampling, which contributes to the return of for instance, mycorrhizal fungi to the area. It should also be noted that the full number of parallel samples from the CC site in the spring and the autumn were not successful. In addition, the summer samples failed completely and no results could be obtained from them. The failure of the samples may be explained by the long hot and dry period in the area in the summer of 2021.