Fire’s Eco-Evolutionary Role in Shaping Terrestrial Ecosystems

The Science

Plants and animals have co-existed and evolved with fire for millennia. As climate rapidly changes and fire increases worldwide, biodiversity will likely evolve new adaptations. However, fire’s evolutionary pressure on species has received less attention than fire’s ecological impacts on plants and their communities.

This editorial addresses this gap in fire research by synthesizing studies that contribute to the perspective of fire as a dynamic ecological and evolutionary force. Researchers provide a list of recommendations to enable the scientific community to better understand the ecological and evolutionary consequences of fire.

The Impact

Species have adapted to persist to fire regimes. For example, plants can regenerate relatively quickly following a wildfire. How will species persist if the pressures of fire amplify under a warmer climate?

To better understand this question, a team of researchers synthesized studies exploring fire as a dynamic ecological and evolutionary force and placed them in a broader context of fire research. The study discusses the importance of incorporating evolutionary concepts and perspectives into future frameworks and provides a list of recommendations to enable the scientific community to answer critical questions on the evolutionary responses to fire under a changing climate.

Summary

This research explores the impacts of novel fire regimes on forest mortality, new approaches to investigate vegetation-fire feedbacks and resulting plant syndromes (or the propensity of plant biomass to ignite and propagate a fire), fire impacts on plant-fungal interactions, and arthropod community responses to fire. Future frameworks must incorporate evolutionary concepts and perspectives to understand how species will persist given that fire pressures are anticipated to be amplified under a warmer climate.

To better understand the ecological and evolutionary consequences of fire, researchers recommend:

• Developing ecological and evolutionary databases for fire ecology;
• Integrating hierarchical genetic structure or phylogenetic structure;
• Developing new experimental frameworks that limit context-dependent outcomes;
• Increasing sample size and availability of curated datasets;
• Increasing functional trait knowledge; and
• Increasing representation of ecological communities in the literature.

Future studies should establish networks, form interdisciplinary partnerships, unify measurement of fire effects and responses, and incorporate knowledge from diverse communities. 

Principal Investigator

Fernanda Santos
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
[email protected]

Program Manager

Daniel Stover
U.S. Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (SC-33)
Environmental System Science
[email protected]

Funding

This research was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is led by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE), Grant/Award Number: 11176. Support was also received from the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Arctic project through DOE’s Office of Science.

Related Links

• Plain Language Summary of the Article
• Podcast: Functional Ecology Special Feature "Fire as a Dynamic Ecological and Evolutionary Force"

References