Blueberry Fruiting, Pollination, and Climate-Adaptive Silviculture in Northern Minnesota
The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) site in Northern Minnesota uses experimental forest management treatments to study how northern pine forests can best adapt to projected climate stressors such as warming and drought. These silviculture treatments are primarily designed to act on the dominant red pine trees, but they also impact the herbaceous understory plants. Wild blueberry is a particularly significant forest understory plant because of its role as a food source for wildlife and humans. However, blueberry fruiting at ASCC in previous summers had been inexplicably lower than expected. Blueberry fruiting is dependent on many factors, including forest disturbance and insect pollination. In this project, we performed surveys of blueberry fruiting and pollinator presence at ASCC to understand how blueberry plants may be affected by the different silvicultural treatments. We found the greatest abundance of bee pollinators in the more heavily disturbed forest treatments, and the greatest abundance of blueberry fruits in treatments of intermediate disturbance. These results did not support my hypothesis that pollination was a primary limiting factor for fruiting, but they do suggest that both bees and blueberry fruits are limited by sunlight availability.