Assessing Legacy Effects of Wildfires on the Crown Structure of Fire-Tolerant Eucalypt Trees Using Airborne LiDAR Data

The fire-tolerant eucalypt forests of south eastern Australia are assumed to fully recover from even the most intense fires; however, surprisingly, very few studies have quantitatively assessed that recovery. The accurate assessment of horizontal and vertical attributes of tree crowns after fire is essential to understand the fire’s legacy effects on tree growth and on forest structure. In this study, we quantitatively assessed individual tree crowns 8.5 years after a 2009 wildfire that burnt extensive areas of eucalypt forest in temperate Australia. We used airborne LiDAR data validated with field measurements to estimate multiple metrics that quantified the cover, density, and vertical distribution of individual-tree crowns in 51 plots of 0.05 ha in fire-tolerant eucalypt forest across four wildfire severity types (unburnt, low, moderate, high). Significant differences in the field-assessed mean height of fire scarring as a proportion of tree height and in the proportions of trees with epicormic (stem) resprouts were consistent with the gradation in fire severity. Linear mixed-effects models indicated persistent effects of both moderate and high-severity wildfire on tree crown architecture. Trees at high-severity sites had significantly less crown projection area and live crown width as a proportion of total crown width than those at unburnt and low-severity sites. Significant differences in LiDAR -based metrics (crown cover, evenness, leaf area density profiles) indicated that tree crowns at moderate and high-severity sites were comparatively narrow and more evenly distributed down the tree stem. These conical-shaped crowns contrasted sharply with the rounded crowns of trees at unburnt and low-severity sites and likely influenced both tree productivity and the accuracy of biomass allometric equations for nearly a decade after the fire. Our data provide a clear example of the utility of airborne LiDAR data for quantifying the impacts of disturbances at the scale of individual trees. Quantified effects of contrasting fire severities on the structure of resprouter tree crowns provide a strong basis for interpreting post-fire patterns in forest canopies and vegetation profiles in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and other remotely-sensed data at larger scales.