Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths.
Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a study published in the journal Ecology Letters reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes.
“There’s a fair amount of biodiversity research on fire and plants,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with UC Cooperative Extension who is based at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and is the study’s lead author. Research has shown that in ecosystems where fire is a natural and regular occurrence, there can be more species of plants — a greater “species richness” — due to a variety of factors, including fire-related adaptations. But, he said, there hasn’t been nearly as much research in the way of animal biodiversity and fire.
“If you look at how fire operates across the planet, fire actually eats plant productivity,” Moritz said. Productivity, which is a measure of how quickly biomass is generated within a given ecosystem, is also a driver of species richness at broad spatial scales. “When fires occur they can take a bite out of that bottom line,” he added.
If fire regularly consumes some of the base of an ecosystem’s food chain, how does that ripple up to affect the biodiversity at higher levels?
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
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