Growth of forest trees of Mahabaleshwar-I: comparative account

Abstract

Mahabaleshwar is located in the Western Glints at an altitude of 1.350 meters, about 110 km south of Poona. It has an annual average rainfall of 6230 mm confined mostly to south-west monsoon from July to September. The soil is lateritic. It supports a subtropical hill forest dominated by Jambul, Syzyghtm cumini. Five increment plots totaling an area of 6 acres were established at Mahabaleshwar and a total of 1117 trees marked, between 1932 and 1966, mostly at the initiation of the experiment in 1932. All the marked trees were measured for girth at breast height in 1932, 1937, 1942, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1963, 1966 and 1969. This resulted in a total of 6211 comparisons of successive girth measurements for the computation of growth rates. An analysis of this data showed that the mean annual increment in girth ranges from O.13 to 1.44 cms for the various species and sites of various quality. The highest growth rate is exhibited by an early successional species, Xeromphis spinosa(Gela) in a rather open habitat. Other early successional species as well as canopy species of mature forest tend to show relatively high growth rates, while the slowest growth rates are exhibited by species forming the second, stratum in a mature forest.