Evaluation of the private forestland ownership parcelization and its effects on the forest landscape in the southeastern Missouri Ozarks

The recent increase in forestland ownership parcelization has stirred worries for its unknown effects in the forest landscape. Particularly, under parcelized ownership, management activities from forestland owners can result in fragmented harvest events, which may influence the composition, structure and spatial pattern of the forest landscape in the future. Due to the complexity of the related processes and the broad spatial and temporal scale involved, a tool such as forest landscape simulation models is required to properly investigate the ecological consequences of such change.; First, a computer model was developed for the spatial representation of the parcelized forestland ownership patterns. FLOSS---A Forest Land Ownership Spatial Simulator---is a landscape pattern generator designed to create forestland ownership patterns that are strongly characterized by the shape of the underlying Public Land Survey System (PLSS) structure. FLOSS simulates ownership patterns based on the actual parcel size distributions. Model performance is evaluated by comparing with the actual ownership pattern, and is applied for simulating forestland ownership patterns of various parcelization levels.; Second, a transition matrix model is used to characterize the recent change in forestland ownership parcelization. A transition probability matrix for parcel size change was developed based on the plat books of 1930 and 2000. The results from the transition matrix model suggest a strong tendency towards further parcelization, characterized by parcel size classes smaller than 100 ha, and reveals the significant contribution from large scale purchases from private entities, such as the Pioneer Forest, to the current status of the ownership parcelization.; Third, the harvest regimes characterized by a parcelized ownership landscape are spatially implemented for LANDIS to evaluate its effects on forest composition, age structure, and spatial pattern. The effects from parcelization level and harvest intensity are evaluated from LANDIS simulation results by using a 2 x 2 factorial design for short-, mid-, and long-term effects. The results predict that the change in forest landscape will be dominated by the successional process, with significant but limited effects from parcelization levels and harvest intensities. In particular, the spatial pattern of age structure will be affected by the highly limited extent of the harvest intensity associated with the small ownership types, creating age patches with simpler shapes and relatively greater aggregation level compared to those created from purely successional regeneration in the absence of significant disturbance events. The implications and limits of the application are discussed.