First-Order Fire Effects on Animals: Review and Recommendations

R Todd Engstrom

doi:10.4996/fireecology.0601115

Abstract

Models of first-order fire effects are designed to predict tree mortality, soil heating, fuel consumption, and smoke production. Some of these models can be used to predict first-order fire effects on animals (e.g., soil-dwelling organisms as a result of soil heating), but they are also relevant to second-order fire effects on animals, such as habitat change. In this paper, I review a sample of studies of first-order fire effects on animals that use aquatic, subterranean, and terrestrial habitats; use an envirogram as a graphical approach to organize first- and second-order fire effects for a single animal species; recommend how one could obtain better data using Species-Centered Environmental Analysis; and begin to model these effects.

Highlights

Whelan et al (2002) identified three levels on which fire affects animals
The fire regime can modify a species over time to create adaptations to fire. (See Hutto et al [2008] for consideration of adaptations to fire in bird species to infer fire regime.) These three levels roughly correspond to 1) direct or first-order effects that occur over a short time period of days or weeks; 2) second-order or indirect effects, such as vegetation succession, which are influenced by the range of variation in fire characteristics and historical fire interval; and 3) evolutionary effects of fire on animals
Given that an estimated 90 % of terrestrial arthropods spend at least part of their lives in the soil or soil litter (Klein 1988), it would make sense to consider season and intensity of fire to prescribe and apply fire according to the life cycle of target arthropod species

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Whelan et al (2002) identified three levels on which fire affects animals. First, fire can cause injury or death to individuals, or it can motivate individuals to move from or into the burned area. Mortality of animals from fire has been reported in descriptive notes for a large number of taxa (e.g., Erwin and Stasiak 1979; Simons 1989, Esque et al 2003) These studies are of greatest value if they can be used to accumulate data for a species (e.g., sex, cause of death, reproductive condition) in relation to characteristics of a fire for a habitat. In a study of bird communities in conifer forests in western Montana and Wyoming following stand replacement fires, Hutto (1995) found that 15 species of birds were more abundant in recently burned areas than in other available land cover types. Woodpecker persistence may depend on detection of large-scale fires in forested communities and irruptive movement of individuals into the burned areas at a landscape level. Predators/ne cosmptetitors competitors o atisrod itnw io oo nfo thdoasFw rb eqa iuternsaetdaftirseosn;?growingca Dv Acioltsimetrhp pay aotirsoldina two ioooncforyhtde oao swp bm aiu trradte n ed g na ctDatvisfiitpyro laoo cyrn eopm mureneo dgnattffioronmof

A Fire Envirogram

Findings

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS