Journal article
Exploring Prescribed Fire Severity Effects on Ground Beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) Taxonomic and Functional Community Composition
FIRE-SWITZERLAND, v 6(9), 366
Sep 2023
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Prescribed fire is a management tool that is frequently used to foster biodiversity. Simultaneously, insects that provide essential ecosystem services are globally declining. Within the pyroentomology literature, there are mixed reports of positive and negative effects that prescribed fires have on insect communities. This is likely due to not accounting for fire heterogeneity created by fire severity. To better understand prescribed fire severity effects on insect communities, we used multispectral reflectance data collected by Sentinel-2 to methodically quantify prescribed fire severity and compared ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) taxonomic and functional community composition responses between an unburned site and two burned sites with contrasting fire impacts. We found 23 ground beetle species and used 30 morphological, physiological, phenological, and ecological functional traits for each species. We found that our moderate fire severity site had different taxonomic and functional community compositions from both our unburned and high-severity sites. Surprisingly, we did not find a strong difference in taxonomic or functional ground beetle composition between our unburned and high-severity sites. Our results encourage future pyroentomology studies to account for fire severity, which will help guide conservation managers to make more accurate decisions and predictions about prescribed fire effects on insect biodiversity.
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Details
- Title
- Exploring Prescribed Fire Severity Effects on Ground Beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) Taxonomic and Functional Community Composition
- Publication Details
- FIRE-SWITZERLAND, v 6(9), 366
- Publisher
- MDPI; BASEL
- Grant note
- We thank New Jersey Forest Fire Service, and specifically fire wardens Tom Gerber, Samuel Moore III, and Shawn Judy, for conducting the prescribed burns and providing expert wisdom that were critical to the development of this study. We also thank Emile DeVito and Russell Juelg of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation for facilitating our use of the Franklin Parker Preserve for our research. We thank Jon Gelhaus, Sean O'Donnell, Marina Potapova, Alain Maasri, and Richard Horwitz for providing direction for this research. We thank Jacquelyne Ng, Madeline Sabo, Marina Jackson, Cameron Chung, and Nathan D. Hunt for helping with the field work and/or sorting pitfall trap samples. We thank Academy of Natural Sciences' librarians Alexandria Capone and Kelsey Manahan-Phelan for helping to gather the literature, as well as Isabelle Betancourt, Greg Cowper, and Jason Weintraub for helping to manage and curate the pitfall trap collection at the Academy.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Drexel University
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001079107600001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85172906345
- Other Identifier
- 991021861203804721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Ecology
- Forestry