Effects of Wildfire on Biodiversity
A special issue of Fire (ISSN 2571-6255).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2023) | Viewed by 44477
Special Issue Editors
Interests: landscape ecology; geospatial analysis; plant community ecology; fire ecology; landscape dynamics; ecosystem processes
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Wildfire size and frequency is increasing across Earth’s ecosystems, presenting us with a fire paradox. It is well documented that wildfires were more common in many ecosystems across the globe a couple of centuries ago compared to present time. Today, we are alarmed by the increase in fire frequency and burned area, although the magnitude is not yet approaching the area historically burned in most regions. We are caught in the complex task of defining effects of fire on ecosystems and biodiversity, entangled in fire regime characteristics such as fire frequency, severity, season of burn, fire size, and variability in time and space. A central question to ecologists, fire scientists, and natural resource managers is the impact changes in fire regime characteristics have on Earth’s biodiversity, both locally and regionally. Huston’s intermediate disturbance hypothesis suggests that local species diversity is maximized when disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent, but how do we identify where and when, and at what scale, wildfires are too rare or too frequent?
The goal of this Special Issue is to compile a set of scientific articles describing how wildfire has impacted diversity in the ecosystem where they occurred. We invite articles that present measured or modeled effects of wildfire on diversity across various scales and dimensions of fire regime metrics and biological taxa, including but not limited to:
- Effects of wildfire on diversity of any taxa in any ecosystem
- Relationships between fire effects and abiotic factors such as climate
- Predictions of changes in fire effects as a result of a changing climate
- Effects of scale in the interpretation of fire effects on biodiversity
- Consequences of larger burned area for the composition of communities and landscapes
- Consequences of wildfire on biogeochemistry, such as the global carbon cycle
Dr. Eva K. Strand
Dr. Darcy H. Hammond
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- wildfire
- fire effects
- biodiversity
- fire regimes
- disturbance
- climate change
- biotic community
- landscape composition
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