Forest Ecology and Management 260 (2010) 480–490 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Ecology and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco Large wood abundance, distribution and mobilization in a third order Coastal mountain range river system, southern Chile Andrés Iroumé a,∗ , Andrea Andreoli b , Francesco Comiti c , Héctor Ulloa a , Anton Huber d a Universidad Austral de Chile, Institute of Forest Management, Independencia 641, Valdivia 5110566, Chile b Universidad de Concepción, Department of Forestry and Environmental Management, Víctoria 631, Concepción 4030000, Chile c Free University of Bolzen-Bolzano, Faculty of Science and Technology, piazza Università 5, 39100 Bolzano, Italy d Universidad Austral de Chile, Institute of Geosciences, Independencia 641, Valdivia 5110566, Chile article info Article history: Received 15 February 2010 Received in revised form 27 April 2010 Accepted 2 May 2010 Keywords: Large wood Channel segment Evergreen indigenous forest LW mobilization abstract Large wood (LW) abundance, longitudinal distribution and mobilization were studied in the Vuelta de la Zorra channel draining a third order catchment located in the Coastal mountain range of southern Chile. Seventy-five percent of the 586.8 ha study catchment area is covered by evergreen native rainforests, 24% by Eucalyptus nitens plantations and the remaining 1% are different sites were native tree and shrub species are regenerating in areas that were prepared for forest replacement in the late 1980s but finally left unplanted. In a segment, 1557 m in length, surveyed between November 2008 and February 2009, a total of 484 pieces representing 181 m 3 of LW were measured. Using bankfull width and length this volume corresponds to 109 m 3 ha -1 or 11.6 m 3 100 m -1 . LW was distributed along the channel in correlation with bankfull width. The channel segment was re-surveyed in December 2009 and we found that after one winter season 12% of the LW were transported downstream the river channel and 9 new wood elements were recruited. The LW traveled distance and traveled distance/piece diameter ratio decreased with increasing piece length/mean bankfull ratio. These results contribute to understand the complexity of LW abundance, mobilization and recruitment processes, and their effects on channel morphology, sediment routing and ecology in Chilean catchments. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In Latin America there is little specific information about in- channel large wood (LW) abundance and its morphological and ecological effects, besides old anecdotal references reported by Garcia-Martínez and López (2005) from a previous testimony describing a large flood that occurred in 1798 in the Osorio river (La Guairia region, Venezuela) that carried “wood trunks of con- siderable size” and by Vidal Gormaz (1875) after his 19th century expedition to southern Chile alluding to in-stream woods in sev- eral rivers, and different more recent mentions of trees and wood in debris flows in the Andean region such as in PMA-GCA (2007). More recent information on LW in Latin America can be split into tropical and temperate environments. For the former, Montgomery et al. (2003) report about a river in the Bolivian upper Amazon basin, Wright and Flecker (2004) inform from a Venezuelan pied- mont river, Cadol et al. (2009) present results concerning different streams in Costa Rica and Wohl et al. (2009) analyze episodic wood loading processes in a river basin in Panama. For temperate basins, ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +56 63 293003. E-mail address: airoume@uach.cl (A. Iroumé). Andreoli et al. (2007), Comiti et al. (2008) and Mao et al. (2008) describe LW abundance and associated river morphology in two Chilean Andean rivers and in a catchment near the city of Ushuaia in the Argentinean Patagonia. In other regions of the world, with exceptions from Lyell (1837), Hack and Goodlett (1960), Zimmerman et al. (1967), Heede (1972), Beschta (1979), Keller and Swanson (1979) and Keller and Tally (1979), in-stream LW was little investigated up to mid 1980s. The research has since consolidated firstly focusing on rivers in the northwest of North America, draining catchments covered by old forests which are able to supply large volumes of wood and cre- ate characteristic morphological structures (Triska, 1984; Sedell and Frogatt, 1984), and then covering other sites in the United States (Marcus et al., 2002; Zelt and Wohl, 2004; Morris et al., 2007; Magilligan et al., 2008; Warren and Kraft, 2008; Wohl and Goode, 2008). Other experiences relate to LW effects in Japanese urban- ized areas (Ishikawa, 1990; Uchiogi et al., 1996), several studies in Europe (Piégay and Gurnell, 1997; Piégay et al., 1999; Kail, 2003; Van der Nat and Tockner, 2003; Comiti et al., 2006; Francis et al., 2008; Sear et al., 2010), the reports by Jacobson et al. (1999) in Africa and Baillie and Davies (2002), Brooks et al. (2003), Webb and Erskine (2003), Baillie et al. (2008) and Beets et al. (2008) in Oceania. 0378-1127/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2010.05.004