Altered fire regimes modify lizard communities in globally endangered Araucaria forests of the southern Andes
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Infante J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8609011 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The Pleistocene was characterized by worldwide shifts in community compositions. Some of these shifts were a result of changes in fire regimes, which influenced the distribution of species belonging to fire-dependent communities. We studied an endangered juniper-oak shrubland specialist, the black-capped vireo (Vireo atricapilla). This species was locally extirpated in parts of Texas and Oklahoma by the end of the 1980s as a result of habitat change and loss, predation, brood parasitism, and anthropogenic fire suppression. We sequenced multiple nuclear loci and used coalescence methods to obtain a deeper understanding of historical population trends than that typically available from microsatellites or mtDNA. We compared our estimated population history, a long-term history of the fire regime and ecological niche models representing the mid-Holocene, last glacial maximum, and last interglacial. Our Bayesian skyline plots showed a pattern of historical population fluctuation that was consistent with changing fire regimes. Genetic data suggest that the species is genetically unstructured, and that the current population should be orders of magnitude larger than it is at present. We suggest that fire suppression and habitat loss are primary factors contributing to the recent decline of the BCVI, although the role of climate change since the last glacial maximum is unclear at present.
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Project description:Fire activity in North American forests is expected to increase substantially with climate change. This would represent a growing risk to human settlements and industrial infrastructure proximal to forests, and to the forest products industry. We modelled fire size distributions in southern Québec as functions of fire weather and land cover, thus explicitly integrating some of the biotic interactions and feedbacks in a forest-wildfire system. We found that, contrary to expectations, land-cover and not fire weather was the primary driver of fire size in our study region. Fires were highly selective on fuel-type under a wide range of fire weather conditions: specifically, deciduous forest, lakes and to a lesser extent recently burned areas decreased the expected fire size in their vicinity compared to conifer forest. This has large implications for fire risk management in that fuels management could reduce fire risk over the long term. Our results imply, for example, that if 30% of a conifer-dominated landscape were converted to hardwoods, the probability of a given fire, occurring in that landscape under mean fire weather conditions, exceeding 100,000 ha would be reduced by a factor of 21. A similarly marked but slightly smaller effect size would be expected under extreme fire weather conditions. We attribute the decrease in expected fire size that occurs in recently burned areas to fuel availability limitations on fires spread. Because regenerating burned conifer stands often pass through a deciduous stage, this would also act as a negative biotic feedback whereby the occurrence of fires limits the size of nearby future for some period of time. Our parameter estimates imply that changes in vegetation flammability or fuel availability after fires would tend to counteract shifts in the fire size distribution favoring larger fires that are expected under climate warming. Ecological forecasts from models neglecting these feedbacks may markedly overestimate the consequences of climate warming on fire activity, and could be misleading. Assessments of vulnerability to climate change, and subsequent adaptation strategies, are directly dependent on integrated ecological forecasts. Thus, we stress the need to explicitly incorporate land-cover's direct effects and feedbacks in simulation models of coupled climate-fire-fuels systems.
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Project description:Implementation of wildfire- and climate-adaptation strategies in seasonally dry forests of western North America is impeded by numerous constraints and uncertainties. After more than a century of resource and land use change, some question the need for proactive management, particularly given novel social, ecological, and climatic conditions. To address this question, we first provide a framework for assessing changes in landscape conditions and fire regimes. Using this framework, we then evaluate evidence of change in contemporary conditions relative to those maintained by active fire regimes, i.e., those uninterrupted by a century or more of human-induced fire exclusion. The cumulative results of more than a century of research document a persistent and substantial fire deficit and widespread alterations to ecological structures and functions. These changes are not necessarily apparent at all spatial scales or in all dimensions of fire regimes and forest and nonforest conditions. Nonetheless, loss of the once abundant influence of low- and moderate-severity fires suggests that even the least fire-prone ecosystems may be affected by alteration of the surrounding landscape and, consequently, ecosystem functions. Vegetation spatial patterns in fire-excluded forested landscapes no longer reflect the heterogeneity maintained by interacting fires of active fire regimes. Live and dead vegetation (surface and canopy fuels) is generally more abundant and continuous than before European colonization. As a result, current conditions are more vulnerable to the direct and indirect effects of seasonal and episodic increases in drought and fire, especially under a rapidly warming climate. Long-term fire exclusion and contemporaneous social-ecological influences continue to extensively modify seasonally dry forested landscapes. Management that realigns or adapts fire-excluded conditions to seasonal and episodic increases in drought and fire can moderate ecosystem transitions as forests and human communities adapt to changing climatic and disturbance regimes. As adaptation strategies are developed, evaluated, and implemented, objective scientific evaluation of ongoing research and monitoring can aid differentiation of warranted and unwarranted uncertainties.
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Project description:Wildfires are a natural disturbance in many ecosystems. However, their effect on biotic interactions has been poorly studied. Fire consumes the vegetation and the litter layer where many parasites spend part of their life cycles. We hypothesize that wildfires reduce habitat availability for parasites with consequent potential benefits for hosts. We tested this for the lizard Psammodromus algirus and its ectoparasites in a Mediterranean ecosystem. We predicted that lizards in recently burned areas would have lower parasite load (cleaning effect) than those in unburned areas and that this phenomenon implies that lizards spending their entire lives in postfire conditions experience a lower level of parasitism than those living in unburned areas. We compared the ectoparasite load of lizards between eight paired burned/unburned sites, including recent (less than 1 year postfire) and older fires (2-4 years). We found that lizards' ectoparasites prevalence was drastically reduced in recently burned areas. Likewise, lizards in older burned areas showed less evidence of past parasitic infections. Fire disrupted the host-parasite interaction, providing the opportunity for lizards to avoid the negative effects of ectoparasites. Our results suggest that wildfires probably fulfil a role in controlling vector-borne diseases and pathogens, and highlight ecological effects of wildfires that have been overlooked.
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Project description:Global fire monitoring systems are crucial to study fire behaviour, fire regimes and their impact at the global scale. Although global fire products based on the use of Earth Observation satellites exist, most remote sensing products only partially cover the requirements for these analyses. These data do not provide information like fire size, fire spread speed, how fires may evolve and joint into single event, or the number of fire events for a given area. This high level of abstraction is very valuable; it makes it possible to characterize fires by types (either size, spread, behaviour, etc.). Here, we present and test a data mining work flow to create a global database of single fires that allows for the characterization of fire types and fire regimes worldwide. This work describes the data produced by a data mining process using MODIS burnt area product Collection 6 (MCD64A1). The entire product has been computed until the present and is available under the umbrella of the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS).
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Project description:Fire is a ubiquitous component of the Earth system that is poorly understood. To date, a global-scale understanding of fire is largely limited to the annual extent of burning as detected by satellites. This is problematic because fire is multidimensional, and focus on a single metric belies its complexity and importance within the Earth system. To address this, we identified five key characteristics of fire regimes--size, frequency, intensity, season, and extent--and combined new and existing global datasets to represent each. We assessed how these global fire regime characteristics are related to patterns of climate, vegetation (biomes), and human activity. Cross-correlations demonstrate that only certain combinations of fire characteristics are possible, reflecting fundamental constraints in the types of fire regimes that can exist. A Bayesian clustering algorithm identified five global syndromes of fire regimes, or pyromes. Four pyromes represent distinctions between crown, litter, and grass-fueled fires, and the relationship of these to biomes and climate are not deterministic. Pyromes were partially discriminated on the basis of available moisture and rainfall seasonality. Human impacts also affected pyromes and are globally apparent as the driver of a fifth and unique pyrome that represents human-engineered modifications to fire characteristics. Differing biomes and climates may be represented within the same pyrome, implying that pathways of change in future fire regimes in response to changes in climate and human activity may be difficult to predict.
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Project description:The analysis of transcriptomes is well-established and increasingly affordable in studies at the interface of ecology and evolution. Expression analysis of thousands of genes in parallel reveals functions and pathways involved in relevant phenotypic differentiation. The application of such methods typically involves the sacrifice of the analysed organisms, which is potentially subject to ethical and legal constraints. As an alternative to lethal sampling, transcriptome analyses can be performed using small biopsies of dispensable tissues. It has to be verified, however, to what extent such results are representative of the whole organism. Here, we use a custom microarray to compare transcriptomes of tail-clip samples with those of the remaining whole-body of fire salamander larvae (Salamandra salamandra). The microarray was calibrated using target RNA to validate the performance of each probe. We varied water temperature to test whether the thermal response in gene expression can be characterized in both types of sample. A large fraction (51 %) of the differentially expressed genes showed parallel changes for both tail clips and whole bodies in response to temperature. While sets of differentially expressed were not identical, they largely belonged to the same functional categories. The gene functions thus revealed a common thermal response of larvae irrespective of the sampled tissue. This included an overexpression of mitochondrial transcripts, an expected thermal acclimatization response of ectotherms. Hence, ecological transcriptomics based on small biopsies represent an alternative to the analysis of lethally sampled tissues in situations where the sacrifice of individuals is not an option.
2015-06-20 | GSE70054 | GEO
Project description:Fire seasonality, an important characteristic of fire regimes, commonly is delineated using seasons based on single weather variables (rainfall or temperature). We used nonparametric cluster analyses of a 17-year (1993-2009) data set of weather variables that influence likelihoods and spread of fires (relative humidity, air temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, soil moisture) to explore seasonality of fire in pine savanna-grassland landscapes at the Avon Park Air Force Range in southern Florida. A four-variable, three-season model explained more variation within fire weather variables than models with more seasons. The three-season model also delineated intra-annual timing of fire more accurately than a conventional rainfall-based two-season model. Two seasons coincided roughly with dry and wet seasons based on rainfall. The third season, which we labeled the fire season, occurred between dry and wet seasons and was characterized by fire-promoting conditions present annually: drought, intense solar radiation, low humidity, and warm air temperatures. Fine fuels consisting of variable combinations of pyrogenic pine needles, abundant C4 grasses, and flammable shrubs, coupled with low soil moisture, and lightning ignitions early in the fire season facilitate natural landscape-scale wildfires that burn uplands and across wetlands. We related our three season model to fires with different ignition sources (lightning, military missions, and prescribed fires) over a 13-year period with fire records (1997-2009). Largest wildfires originate from lightning and military ignitions that occur within the early fire season substantially prior to the peak of lightning strikes in the wet season. Prescribed ignitions, in contrast, largely occur outside the fire season. Our delineation of a pronounced fire season provides insight into the extent to which different human-derived fire regimes mimic lightning fire regimes. Delineation of a fire season associated with timing of natural lightning ignitions should be useful as a basis for ecological fire management of humid savanna-grassland landscapes worldwide.
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