Abstract
BackgroundWildfires are one of the major environmental concerns in Mediterranean ecosystems. Thus, many studies have addressed wildfire impacts on soil and vegetation in Mediterranean forests, but the linkages between these ecosystem compartments after fire are not well understood. The aim of this work is to analyze soil-vegetation relationships in Mediterranean burned forests as well as the consistency of these relationships among forests with different environmental conditions, at different times after fire, and among vegetation with different functional traits.ResultsOur results indicate that study site conditions play an important role in mediating soil-vegetation relationships. Likewise, we found that the nature of soil-vegetation relationships may vary over time as fire effects are less dominant in both ecosystem compartments. Despite this, we detected several common soil-vegetation relationships among study sites and times after fire. For instance, our results revealed that available P content and stoichiometry (C:P and N:P) were closely linked to vegetation growth, and particularly to the growth of trees. We found that enzymatic activities and microbial biomass were inversely related to vegetation growth rates, whereas the specific activities of soil enzymes were higher in the areas with more vegetation height and cover. Likewise, our results suggest that resprouters may influence soil properties more than seeders, the growth of seeders being more dependent on soil status.ConclusionsWe provide pioneer insights into how vegetation is influenced by soil, and vice-versa, in Mediterranean burned areas. Our results reflect variability in soil-vegetation relationships among study sites and time after fire, but consistent patterns between soil properties and vegetation were also detected. Our research is highly relevant to advance in forest science and could be useful to achieve efficient post-fire management.
Highlights
Wildfires are one of the major environmental concerns in Mediterranean ecosystems
The four study sites were affected by wildfires that consumed most of the tree canopy cover, the dNBR burn severity index averaging values above 400 (Table 1; Table A1), which indicates moderate-high and high severities (Key and Benson 2006)
Characterization of soil and vegetation status and dynamics Soil analysis revealed that recently burned sites (1–2 years) had the highest available P (AP) values, C:P and N:P ratios and the lowest β-glucosidase activity (Table A3 – supplementary material)
Summary
Wildfires are one of the major environmental concerns in Mediterranean ecosystems. many studies have addressed wildfire impacts on soil and vegetation in Mediterranean forests, but the linkages between these ecosystem compartments after fire are not well understood. Fire modifies soil biochemical properties, in general, decreasing microbial biomass and soil enzymatic activity for several years, which brings about a slowdown of soil biochemical reactions (Fernández-García et al 2019a, 2019b; FernándezGarcía et al 2020). All these properties and processes are closely related to soil quality, and they determine vegetation composition and growth, but little is known about the interaction of both ecosystem compartments in post-fire environments (Moya et al 2018; Quigley et al 2020)
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