1. Short Spatiotemporal Fire History Explains the Occurrence of Beetles Favoured by Fire.
- Author
-
Milberg, Per, Bergman, Karl-Olof, Jansson, Nicklas, Norman, Henrik, Sundin, Fia, Westerberg, Lars, and Johansson, Victor
- Subjects
FOREST conservation ,FOREST fires ,FOREST reserves ,NUMBERS of species ,INSECTS ,FIRE management ,BEETLES - Abstract
Simple Summary: How far in space and time should conservation burns be conducted to provide most benefit to beetles favoured by forest fires? We systematically sampled forest reserves with different fire history and found that most pyrophilic beetles were found when fires in the vicinity of the reserves were close and quite recent. The number and area of forest fires in northern Europe have been dramatically reduced during the past century, and several fire-favoured species are now threatened. To promote the recovery of these species, prescribed burning is often used as a conservation measure, and to optimise the use of these conservation burns, knowledge is needed on suitable fire frequency, size and placement in the landscape. The aim of this study was to analyse the effect of recent fire history (12 yrs) on beetles sampled using smoke attraction traps at 21 forest sites in a 10,000 km
2 region. We analysed the odds of finding a fire-favoured beetle species or individual among the beetles in each trap using a new spatiotemporal connectivity measure and compared the results to non-fire-favoured and saproxylic species. For fire-favoured beetles, both the number of species and individuals significantly increased with connectivity to previous fires, while the other two groups did not. The spatiotemporal connectivity that best explained the patterns suggests that fire-favoured beetles mainly respond to fires within a 2 km range up to 2–3 years after the fire. Hence, to preserve fire-favoured insects, prescribed fires must be close in space and time to other fires—whether prescribed or natural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF