Competitive Interactions between Norway Spruce and Scots Pine at Gisburn Forest, NW England

Species mixtures, although promising for improving the growthof spruce on nitrogendeficient sites, carry a risk of competitionfrom the admixed nurse species. The mixture of Scots pine (Pinussylvestris) and Norway spruce (Picea abies) planted at GisburnForest in 1955, in which nutritional benefits have been observed,provided a unique opportunity to study competition between thesespecies. Pure plots of both species as well as the mixture werereplicated in three blocks, allowing the effects of interplantingon the survival and mean diameter of each species to be testedstatistically. Further, the grouped arrangement of the speciesin mixed plots presented a variety of competitive configurationsbetween the two species. Instead of demonstrating the nursing benefit of pine to spruce,comparisons of mean diameters in pure and mixed stands indicatedthat spruce suffered and pine benefited from their interplantingat this site. Frequency distributions of tree diameters confirmedthat spruce tended to be suppressed in mixture and pine dominant.Neighbour analysis revealed that spruce were significantly smallerwhen adjacent to pine and that this effect was mainly due tothe larger size of pines. The increased height of spruce atthis site, previously attributed to a nutritional benefit conferredby pine, was probably due to competition for light from an overtoppingnurse. Nurse varieties must be carefully selected if they areto promote rather than suppress the growth of crop trees.