A comparison of some habitat requirements of Vaccinium macrocarpon and Vaccinium oxycoccos.

Abstract

This report compares and contrasts the habitats of the two species of cranberries found in North America. These are Vaccinium macrocarpon, the large cranberry, and Vaccinium oxycoccos, the small cranberry. The interpretations made in this report are from field observation only, not from experimentation. I discovered that V. oxycoccos and V. macrocarpon are both shade-intolerant species that grow in a variety of moisture contents ranging from moist to very wet. I also found that V. macrocarpon is an earlier successional species on a sphagnum mat, and is later replaced by V. oxycoccos once the mat becomes more developed. When growing together, this creates a zonation in space where V. macrocarpon generally grows closer to the lake edge and lower on less acidic regions of the sphagnum hummocks and V. oxycoccos generally grows on the more developed sphagnum hummocks farther from the edge of the lake as well as higher up on the more acidic regions of the hummocks.