High resilience of the mycorrhizal community to prescribed seasonal burnings in a Mediterranean woodland

Fire effects on ecosystems range from destruction of aboveground vegetation to direct and indirect effects on belowground microorganisms. Although variation in such effects is expected to be related to fire severity, another potentially important and poorly understood factor is the effects of fire seasonality on soil microorganisms. We carried out a large-scale field experiment examining the effects of spring versus autumn burns on the community composition of soil fungi in a typical Mediterranean woodland. Although the intensity and severity of our prescribed burns were largely consistent between the two burning seasons, we detected differential fire season effects on the composition of the soil fungal community, driven by changes in the saprotrophic fungal guild. The community composition of ectomycorrhizal fungi, assayed both in pine seedling bioassays and from soil sequencing, appeared to be resilient to the variation inflicted by seasonal fires. Since changes in the soil saprotrophic fungal community can directly influence carbon emission and decomposition rates, we suggest that regardless of their intensity and severity, seasonal fires may cause changes in ecosystem functioning.DeclarationsFundingThis research was co-supported by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF Grant 2012081) and Tel-Hai College.Conflicts of interest/Competing interestsWe declare no conflicts of interest and that this material has not been submitted for publication elsewhere.Ethics approvalNot applicableConsent to participateNot applicableConsent for publicationNot applicableAvailability of data and materialSequences were submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive under accession numbers SRRXXX◻SRRXXX.Code availabilityNot applicableAuthors’ contributionsOO HS TB YO YC conceived and designed the experiment. SSL YA HM AT performed the experiment. SIG provided the pipeline scripts, and guidance in bioinformatics work and analyses. SLL OO HS wrote the paper and analyzed the data, and all authors contributed substantially to revisions.

Short-term changes in the structure of ant assemblages in a Guinean savanna under differing fire regimes at Lamto Scientific Reserve, Côte d'Ivoire

To maintain savanna vegetation, mid-seasonal fire has been applied since 1961 in the Lamto Savanna (Côte d'Ivoire). However, this prescribed fire has not impeded tree encroachment during recent years, nor have its effects on insect assemblages been documented. Also the impact of tree intrusion on insect assemblages is poorly studied in savanna. To prevent tree density increasing, a change in fire regime might be a solution. In this study, we examined the effect of different fire regimes (early, mid-seasonal and late fires) on leaf-litter ant assemblages in order to suggest appropriate measures for preventing tree invasion without having an effect on insect communities. Sampling was implemented by combining pitfall trapping and leaf-litter sampling before and after three different fire regimes, early, mid-seasonal and late fires. While the ant species richness declined after the passage of early and mid-seasonal fires, significantly more species were found in the burnt savanna after the late fire. However, the losses or gains of species due to different fire regimes did not cause severe changes in the ant species composition. Of the functional groups identified, only the generalists and specialist predators were respectively strongly affected by the early and mid-seasonal fires, certainly due to micro-habitat modification. Based on the trends observed in the present study, we suggest sampling other invertebrate fauna in similar savanna plots to find out if other insect groups have similar reactions to the applied fire regimes.