Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 39(5): September 2013 Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 2013. 39(5): 201–210 201 Post-transplant Shoot Growth of Trees From Five Different Production Methods is Affected by Site and Species Anna Levinsson Abstract. After transplanting, many trees enter a period of reduced growth that may limit their environmental and aesthetic benefits for several years. A number of nursery production methods have been developed in attempt to reduce root disturbance, which is often associated with the reduced growth. The main objective of this study was to investigate how five nursery production methods affect root systems and post-transplant shoot growth. Other objectives were the study of the effect of root structure (i.e., fibrous verses coarse) on trees’ response to different production methods and the effect of the conditions at the transplanting site. Sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) and red oak (Quercus rubra L.) with a stem cir- cumference of 16–18 cm were produced as bare-rooted-, balled-and-burlapped-, root-pruned-, air-potted-, or fabric-container-grown trees, trans- planted at two sites and studied for five seasons. Visual analysis showed that the production methods had clear effect on the root balls at trans- planting. However, the differences were not clearly related to shoot growth. All transplanted red oaks, regardless of production method, showed significantly reduced shoot growth compared to pre-transplant growth. Balled and burlapped, root-pruned, and fabric-container-grown sweet cherry trees exhibited restored pre-transplant shoot growth three years after transplanting at the more favorable site. The results suggest that the fibrous-rooted sweet cherry was more responsive to production methods designed to reduce transplanting stress than the coarse-rooted red oak, and that site affected the time required for normal shoot growth to be regained. The results do not indicate that different sites require differently produced trees. Key Words. Nursery Production; Prunus avium; Quercus rubra; Red Oak; Root Growth; Root Structure; Shoot Growth; Sweden; Sweet Cherry; Transplanting Stress; Urban Trees. tree’s canopy grows (Fowler et al. 1989). However, trees often exhibit several years of low shoot growth after transplanting, something that has been attributed to disturbance of the root sys- tems (Watson 1985; Harris et al. 2008; Struve 2009). For trees in traditional nursery production systems, such as field-grown bare-rooted (BR) or balled and burlapped (B&B) trees, much of the fine roots are lost during harvesting (Watson and Sydnor 1987). In attempts to reduce root disturbance and thus shorten the period of reduced growth, the tree nursery industry has developed several production methods with the aim of producing landscape-sized trees with large amounts of fine roots that are not lost during harvest (Appleton 1995). Different types of above- ground systems, such as air-pot systems (AP) or fabric-container (FC) in-ground systems, are examples of modern production systems where the trees are delivered with all the roots from the last years’ nursery cultivation left in the root balls. Practices in the nurseries of the more recently developed production systems may somewhat differ between countries. In Sweden, for exam- ple, it is common practice to install field-grown trees in these sys- The presence of trees in urban areas has been reported to have several ecological, environmental, social, and human health- and wellbeing-related benefits (Beckett et al. 2000; Akbari 2002; Tyrvainen et al. 2007; Baris et al. 2009; Saebo et al. 2012). But for an urban tree to fulfill these values as an aesthetic and envi- ronmental resource, it needs to start putting on significant growth after transplanting (Day and Harris 2007). Benefits such as shad- ing, particulate filtration, and CO2 sequestration increase as a tems one or two years prior to transplanting. The purpose of this is to increase the amount fine roots just before transplanting and another intention is to let the trees experience their initial trans- planting stress in the more controlled environment, provided by the nurseries. Therefore, these production methods are referred to as “pre-establishing systems” by the Swedish Nursery Asso- ciation (GRO). Several advantages have been associated with the new production methods, such as higher flexibility in trans- planting period and easier handling due to lighter growth media (Ferrini et al. 2000). Another more recent production method is in-ground root pruning, where the trees are root pruned (RP) for fine-root stimulation one year before harvest and left in the field. For the nursery industry, the introduction of new produc- tion methods involves high investment costs, but they have been shown to lead to higher production per unit land area and to be less labor-intense than the traditional in-field production (Adrian et al. 1998). The price to the consumer is, however, higher than that for a traditionally produced tree. It is therefore important to study whether modern production methods provide the expected benefits in terms of improved post-transplant shoot growth. Shoot growth is dependent on several, often interacting, factors, such as environment, species, and ontogeny (Niklas 2004; Niinemets 2010). Water availability has been suggested to be the primary shoot growth limiting resource for young trees (Liu et al. 2012), and studies on different irrigation regimes and fertilization effects on tree growth after transplanting have sup- ported this (Gilman 2004; Day and Harris 2007). The harvesting ©2013 International Society of Arboriculture
September 2013
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