MUNCY, PA Your global equipment supplier for the biomass industry After almost six years of studies at the Island Lake site, researchers have begun to share some of their early findings with the public. microbial community,” explains Paul Hazlett, a forest soils scientist with the Great Lakes Forestry Centre (GLFC) (a NRCan-CFS research centre in Sault Ste. Marie, and a co-leader on Lake Island research activities). “So whether we left a lot of the tree material on the site after harvesting – what we call a stem-only harvest – or we conducted a bio-mass harvest and removed all of the woody material to the roadside, we didn’t see any difference in the microbial community. It didn’t seem to matter how much material we removed.” In contrast to the relative homogeny of the microbial communities observed in har-vested plots, researchers found clear differ-ences between the microbial community composition in harvested plots, the recently burned site and the uncut forest stands, in-dicating for this specific burned site that in the short-term harvesting has different effects than wildfire. “The harvested sites were different from the uncut sites, and from the forest fire sites, as well,” Hazlett notes. “It is important for us to understand to what degree our harvesting practices emulate natural disturbances in these forests.” An experiment led by Lisa Venier, a re-search scientist at GLFC focusing on the ef-fect of the different harvest intensities on bio-diversity in soil invertebrates yielded similar results. “Another element that we looked at in the biodiversity realm was soil invertebrates, so beetles and spiders and other organisms that live in the forest floor. Similar to the microbial community, we did see some dif-ferences between the recently burned site and the harvested and uncut sites,” Hazlett says. “But again, the amount of biomass left on the site didn’t seem to be the important factor in terms of affecting these populations. ANDRITZ is one of the world’s leading suppliers of techno logies, systems, and services relating to equipment for the bio mass pelleting industry. We offer single machines for the production of solid and liquid biofuel and waste pellets. We have the ability to manu facture and supply each and every key processing machine in the pellet pro-duction line. ANDRITZ Feed & Biofuel A/S Europe, Asia, and South America: [email protected] USA and Canada: [email protected] www.andritz.com/ft Canadian BIOMASS CBM_Andritz_ JanFeb17_CSA.indd 1 23 2017-01-11 9:11 AM
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