Fire catalyzed rapid ecological change in lowland coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest over the past 14,000 years

Ecology
Shelley D CrausbayLinda B Brubaker

Abstract

Disturbance can catalyze rapid ecological change by causing widespread mortality and initiating successional pathways, and during times of climate change, disturbance may contribute to ecosystem state changes by initiating a new successional pathway. In the Pacific Northwest of North America (PNW), disturbance by wildfires strongly shapes the composition and structure of lowland forests, but understanding the role of fire over periods of climate change is challenging, because fire-return intervals are long (e.g., millennia) and the coniferous trees dominating these forests can live for many centuries. We developed stand-scale paleorecords of vegetation and fire that span nearly the past 14,000 yr to study how fire was associated with state changes and rapid dynamics in forest vegetation at the stand scale (1-3 ha). We studied forest history with sediment cores from small hollow sites in the Marckworth State Forest, located ~1 km apart in the Tsuga heterophylla Zone in the Puget Lowland ecoregion of western Washington, USA. The median rate of change in pollen/spore assemblages was similar between sites (0.12 and 0.14% per year), but at both sites, rates of change increased significantly following fire events (ranging up to 1% pe...Continue Reading

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Citations

Feb 23, 2020·Ecological Applications : a Publication of the Ecological Society of America·Susan J PrichardDavid W Peterson
Mar 13, 2019·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Kimberley T DavisMarco P Maneta
Aug 22, 2020·Bioscience·Jonathan D CoopKyle C Rodman
Aug 29, 2020·Science·Damien A FordhamDavid Nogues-Bravo
Nov 11, 2020·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Caitlin E LittlefieldKimberley T Davis
May 23, 2018·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·Zak RatajczakMonica G Turner

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