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Forests
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Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene
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Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Ecology and Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (5 October 2021) | Viewed by 10205

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Pere Pons

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Guest Editor
Departament de Ciències Ambientals, Universitat de Girona, Catalonia, Spain
Interests: fire ecology; biodiversity conservation; forest management; ornithology; entomology
Dr. Xavier Santos

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Guest Editor
CIBIO/InBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos da Universidade do Porto. Instituto de Ciências Agrárias de Vairão. R. Padre Armando Quintas 7, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal
Interests: fire ecology; herpetology; conservation biology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Socioeconomic and climate factors are modifying fire regimes. Wildfires of unprecedented extension and severity have recently occurred in Australia, South and North America, Siberia, and the Mediterranean Basin. Most often, these fires interact with former forest disturbances like insect outbreaks, diseases, windstorms, droughts, or air pollution, all of which are common in Anthropocene forests. Furthermore, burned forests are often harvested, and salvage logging constitutes a second intense disturbance within a short time period.

The idea that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity has been demonstrated under some circumstances, but it is also known that changes in fire regimes are a threat to species and ecosystems. Knowledge on the ecological effects of a new fire-regime scenario, and the interactions with other forest disturbances are fundamental to understand how biodiversity will respond to this current environmental instability, and to anticipate strategies for forest resilience and biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, there are many knowledge gaps on the responses of particular taxa (especially invertebrates) to fire, the effects of post-fire management strategies for biodiversity conservation, the disruptions of biotic interactions caused by the fire, or the importance of particular functional traits for resilience to fire.

For this Special Issue, we are inviting papers that provide novel insights into the responses of biodiversity to the new fire regimes we are facing. The main topics include, but are not limited to, the following: biodiversity in fire-prone landscapes, pyrodiversity–biodiversity studies, post-fire recovery of animal and plant populations, multi-taxon approaches to community responses, fire and biotic interactions, fire refuges for biodiversity, additive effects of fire and other disturbances, and tests of management strategies to favor biodiversity in fire-prone regions.

Dr. Pere Pons
Dr. Xavier Santos
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • New fires
  • Biodiversity
  • Fire refuges
  • Population recovery
  • Animal communities
  • Plant communities
  • Additive disturbances
  • Forest management
  • Field studies

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 7079 KiB  
Article
Birds and the Fire Cycle in a Resilient Mediterranean Forest: Is There Any Baseline?
by Roger Prodon
Forests 2021, 12(12), 1644; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12121644 - 27 Nov 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2109
Abstract
This study investigates the effects of recurrent wildfires on the resilience of a typical Mediterranean ecosystem. It is based on uninterrupted monitoring over 42 years of the avifauna in a cork oak forest that burned three times during this time interval. The monitoring [...] Read more.
This study investigates the effects of recurrent wildfires on the resilience of a typical Mediterranean ecosystem. It is based on uninterrupted monitoring over 42 years of the avifauna in a cork oak forest that burned three times during this time interval. The monitoring involved two line-transect counts in spring accompanied by the simultaneous and independent estimation of the vegetation cover profile. One of the two transects was initially designed to serve as an unburned control before it also burned during the second fire. Many forest bird species were already present from the first spring postfire due to the rapid regeneration of the canopy. Some open-habitat bird species colonized the burned area during the first 2–4 years after the fire, resulting in an initial phase of high diversity. The postfire bird succession was mainly driven by sedentary species that recolonized the burned area after the first winter, whereas most migratory species present before the fire resettled as early as the first postfire spring, probably because of site tenacity. It was found that the impact of the second fire on avifauna was lower than that of the first or third fire. The return to an avifauna and forest structure successionally equivalent to the prefire control was achieved in about 15 years, which can be considered as the recovery time. Afterwards, both vegetation and avifauna in the burned areas tended to take on more forest characteristics than in the prefire control. These findings suggest that: (i) the recurrence of fire does not necessarily result in the cumulative degradation of the ecosystem at each repetition; (ii) the asymptotic resilience model is not adapted to the case of disturbances in non-mature environments; (iii) the notion of returning to an original undisturbed baseline is illusive in an area that has been under continuous human influence since ancient times. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene)
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17 pages, 4603 KiB  
Article
Analysing How Pre-Fire Habitat Legacy and Post-Fire Management Influence the Resilience of Reptiles to Fire
by Alberto Muñoz, Ángel M. Felicísimo and Xavier Santos
Forests 2021, 12(11), 1487; https://doi.org/10.3390/f12111487 - 29 Oct 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1524
Abstract
At the landscape scale, the Mediterranean region is a mosaic of habitats occupied by plants and animals with different resilience to fire. One of these habitats, the pine plantation, is characterized by its structural simplification and susceptibility to fire. Despite its high flammability, [...] Read more.
At the landscape scale, the Mediterranean region is a mosaic of habitats occupied by plants and animals with different resilience to fire. One of these habitats, the pine plantation, is characterized by its structural simplification and susceptibility to fire. Despite its high flammability, few studies have compared the response of animal communities between pine plantations and other autochthonous woodlands. For five years after a large fire in southwestern Europe, we surveyed reptiles in two natural habitats (oak forest, scrubland) and a pine plantation managed with salvage logging, a post-fire practice which consists of the complete harvesting and removal of death burnt trees. Reptile abundance and species composition were examined to assess differences in the reptile community between these habitats. Differences between burnt and unburnt transects were limited to the first year after the fire, while, over the entire five-year period, differences in species composition and abundance were due to vegetation type instead of fire. The pine logged area showed a delay in the recovery of vegetation and also in the appearance of many reptile species after the fire. At the reptile species level, we found evidence of both positive responses to fire (for lizards with high heliothermic activity) and negative ones (for specialist snake species). Overall, our results confirm the resilience of the reptile community to fire. The mosaic of habitats in the Mediterranean region and the openness caused by fire can increase the reptile biodiversity (landscape- plus pyro-diversity effects), but some practices such as salvage logging coupled with fire regime shifts (larger and more frequent fires) can compromise the conservation of the biodiversity in fire-prone regions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene)
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16 pages, 2501 KiB  
Article
Post-Fire Recovery of Vegetation and Diversity Patterns in Semiarid Pinus halepensis Mill. Habitats after Salvage Logging
by Daniel Moya, Javier Sagra, Manuel Esteban Lucas-Borja, Pedro Antonio Plaza-Álvarez, Javier González-Romero, Jorge De Las Heras and Pablo Ferrandis
Forests 2020, 11(12), 1345; https://doi.org/10.3390/f11121345 - 17 Dec 2020
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3057
Abstract
After wildfires, emergency actions and post-fire management are implemented to mitigate fire damage. Salvage logging is a tool often applied to burned stands, but despite being a post-fire forest management tool to restore ecosystem functions, its ecological effects remain poorly understood. In the [...] Read more.
After wildfires, emergency actions and post-fire management are implemented to mitigate fire damage. Salvage logging is a tool often applied to burned stands, but despite being a post-fire forest management tool to restore ecosystem functions, its ecological effects remain poorly understood. In the Mediterranean Basin, where land use and land-use change are bringing about changes in drought periods and fire regimes, optimal treatments should be included in adaptive management in order to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability. In July 2012, a mid- to high-burn severity fire burned almost 7000 ha of an Aleppo pine forest (Pinus halepensis Mill.) in southeastern Spain. Five years later (late spring 2017), we designed an experimental study to monitor four stand categories on a burn severity basis (unburned mature stands, low-burn severity stands, and high-burn severity stands) and a salvage logging operation carried out 6 months after the fire in high-burn severity areas. We set 60 circular plots (15 in each treatment scenario) and 180 linear transects (3 per plot, 45 per scenario) to check the ecological facilitation of pine trees and snags (canopy size and/or perch effect). We estimated plant alpha diversity (floristic richness, abundance and dominance indices) and post-fire plant recovery (pine recruitment and adaptive traits). Fire depleted the system’s diversity, but in low-severity burning areas some basic functions remained intact (e.g., soil protection). We found that high-burn severity very negatively impacted ecosystem functions through the removal of duff and litter leaving unprotected soil. Collecting wood reduced pine regeneration and growth, which was considerable in the areas that suffered high-burn severity. The burned snags did not appear to act as perches resulting in seed dispersal. Obligate seeders were determined to be an efficient strategy for facing high-severity fires, whereas resprouters response showed no clear burn severity pattern despite being present in all the scenarios. Therefore, salvage logging did not affect the recovery of some ecosystem properties/features (such as plant total cover or litter cover), although retaining dead pines facilitated pine regeneration. Thus, leaving snags in areas affected by high-burn severity in ecosystems mainly modelled by fires is proposed. However, the ecosystem response could be widely variable and influenced by local abiotic factors, so restoration might not be as effective as in the current proposal. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene)
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15 pages, 2022 KiB  
Article
Mice and Habitat Complexity Attract Carnivorans to Recently Burnt Forests
by Roger Puig-Gironès and Pere Pons
Forests 2020, 11(8), 855; https://doi.org/10.3390/f11080855 - 06 Aug 2020
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 2324
Abstract
Faunal responses to wildfire depend on the fire effects on direct mortality, habitat structure, and resource availability for animals. Despite the importance of large predators in terrestrial trophic webs, little is still known about how fire affects carnivorans (the mammalian order Carnivora). To [...] Read more.
Faunal responses to wildfire depend on the fire effects on direct mortality, habitat structure, and resource availability for animals. Despite the importance of large predators in terrestrial trophic webs, little is still known about how fire affects carnivorans (the mammalian order Carnivora). To evaluate the responses of the carnivoran community to fire, we studied three recently burnt forest areas in the western Mediterranean basin. Line transects were used to quantify evidence of carnivorans (mainly feces) and to measure environmental variables and resources (small mammal abundance, fleshy fruit availability, and plant cover). Throughout the study, we found 212 carnivoran field signs, 93% of them produced by red fox and stone marten. Immediately after fire, carnivoran occurrence was more frequent close to the perimeter of the burnt area, where fire severity was low, and in places with greater small mammal abundance. Small mammal abundance and plant cover had the greatest effect on the frequency of occurrence of red fox in the burnt area surroundings, and this increased with time-since-fire in the burnt area. Furthermore, the presence of red fox did not affect stone marten occurrence. Stone martens were found around the burnt area perimeter, probably because of their preference for high plant cover, and they were not significantly affected by small mammal abundance. The scat frequency of occurrence of both species was not significantly related to fleshy fruit availability. Accordingly, rodents and carnivorans were more abundant where the habitat was more complex. Our results show that the responses of some carnivorans to fire are influenced, directly and indirectly, by habitat structure and resource availability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Fires and Biodiversity in the Anthropocene)
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