Occurrence of inonotus dryophilus and phellinus robustus in coppice oak stands of Ulyanovsk region

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to study the occurrence of Phellinus robustus (Karst.) Bourd.et Galz.) and Inonotus dryophilus (Berk.) Murr. polypores in coppice oak stands with different inventory indicators. The relevance of this topic lies in the fact that the area of oak forests throughout their range has reduced catastrophically due to the degradation and collapse of coppice stands, one of the reasons for which is the infection of oak trees with stem rot. The research was carried out on an area of 194.9 hectares of mature and overmature coppice stands in the Slavkinsky district forestry of the Nikolaevsky district, Ulyanovsk region. The occurrence of polypores was determined by setting up 6 sample plots of unspecified area with 100 trees in each. The highest occurrence of P. robustus was found in the poaceous-small-grass (PSG) oak forests (14%), with slightly lower values in the masterwort-woodruff (MW) type (13%) and the small-grass (SG) type (12%). The occurrence of I. dryophilus is significantly lower compared to P. robustus and is characterized by the following occurrence values: 7% in SG and PSG and 6% in MW oak forest types. On average, for all surveyed forest types, the occurrence value of P. robustus was 13%, and the occurrence value of I. dryophilus was 7%. In all surveyed forest types, the highest occurrence of P. robustus was observed in pure oak stands. In the SG forest type, as the proportion of oak in the forest stand decreases, so does the occurrence of P. robustus. In other types of forest, no definite dependence of P. robustus on the proportion of the oak in the stand’s composition was revealed. The same goes for I. dryophilus in all studied forest types. The highest occurrence of polypores was observed for the most part in older forest stands. As the stand’s density increases, the occurrence of both polypores in all types of oak forests increases as well.