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Fire can change the species composition, diversity, and structure of savanna vegetation, thus altering growth and mortality rates. Such changes in the woody vegetation of burned savanna forest were evaluated over four years in comparison to unburned savanna forest. All woody plants with a diameter at breast height > 10 cm were measured in 100 permanent plots. Six months later, 38 of these plots...

Wind erosion of soil is an appreciable but unstudied event following fires in cold desert. We examined aeolian transport of sediment for 1 year following fire in semi-arid shrub steppe on loess soils in southern Idaho, USA. Sediment collectors were used to determine horizontal mass transport of soil and saltation sensors and anemometers were used to determine saltation activity (fraction of tim...

Timber harvesting, with and without prescribed slash ®re, and wild ®re are common disturbances in pine forests of western North America. These disturbances can alter soil nitrogen (N) pools and N supply to colonizing vegetation, but their in ̄uence remains poorly understood for many forests. We investigated the effects of clear cut harvesting and ®re on KCl extractable N pools, net N mineralizat...

Question: What are the effects of fire in native shrubland communities and in pine plantations established in these shrublands? Location: Northern Patagonia, Argentina. Methods: We surveyed four sites in Chall–Huaco valley, located in northwest Patagonia. Each site was a vegetation mosaic composed of an unburned Pinus ponderosa plantation, a plantation burned in 1996, and an unburned matorral a...

Question: How do interactions between rocky landscape features and fire regime influence vegetation dynamics? Location: Continental Eastern USA. Methods: We measured vegetation, disturbance and site characteristics in 40 pairs of rocky and non-rocky plots: 20 in recently burned stands, and 20 in stands with no evidence of recent fire (‘unburned’ stands). Two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was...

Fire is a complex event that maintains many ecological systems. The Florida Sand Skink (Plestiodon reynoldsi) is precinctive to Florida Scrub, a habitat that is maintained by infrequent fire. We characterize the effect of fire on genetic diversity and genetic differentiation at eight microsatellite loci in the Florida Sand Skink (n=470) collected from 30 replicate sites over three 'time since l...

Assessments of contaminant-related human and ecological risk require estimation of transport rates, but few data exist on wind-driven transport rates in nonagricultural systems, particularly in response to ecosystem disturbances such as forest wildfire and also relative to water-driven transport. The Cerro Grande wildfire in May of 2000 burned across ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Douglas ex P...

Natural disturbance-based management and conservation strategies are needed to protect forest biodiversity. Boreal forests of northern Europe are typically clearcut and otherwise intensively managed for timber production. As a result, natural disturbances such as forest fires have became rare and the volume of dead wood has decreased. These changes have had a profound negative effect on species...