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Retention of Nitrogen Following Wildfire in a Chaparral Ecosystem

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Abstract

Wildfires alter nitrogen (N) cycling in Mediterranean-type ecosystems, resetting plant and soil microbial growth, combusting plant biomass to ash, and enhancing N availability in the upper soil layer. This ash and soil N pool (that is, wildfire N) is susceptible to loss from watersheds via runoff and leaching during post-fire rains. Plant and soil microbial recovery may mitigate these losses by sequestering N compounds in new biomass, thereby promoting landscape N retention in N-limited chaparral ecosystems. We investigated the relative balance between wildfire N loss, and plant and soil microbial N uptake and stream N export for an upland chaparral watershed in southern California that burned (61%) in a high-intensity wildfire in 2009 by using a combination of stream, vegetation, soil microbial, and remote sensing analyses. Soil N in the burn scar was 440% higher than unburned soil N in the beginning of the first post-fire wet season and returned within 66 days to pre-fire levels. Stream N export was 1480% higher than pre-fire export during the first post-fire rain and returned within 106 days over the course of the following three rainstorms to pre-fire levels. A watershed-scale N mass balance revealed that 52% of wildfire N could be accounted for in plant and soil microbial growth, whereas 1% could be accounted for in stream export of dissolved nitrogen.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research program (Grant Numbers OCE99-82105, OCE-0620276 and OCE-123277) and National Science Foundation’s RAPID program administered by the Division of Environmental Biology (Grant Number 0952599). We thank M. Meyerhof and undergraduate assistants for sample collections and laboratory analyses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027, USA

    Blair M. Goodridge

  2. Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Blair M. Goodridge, Rosana Aguilera & John M. Melack

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, 99164, USA

    Erin J. Hanan

  4. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Erin J. Hanan & John M. Melack

  5. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Erin B. Wetherley & Ying-Jung Chen

  6. Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Carla M. D’Antonio

  7. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    John M. Melack

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  1. Blair M. Goodridge
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Correspondence to Blair M. Goodridge.

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Authors Contributions

All coauthors wrote portions of the paper; BMG, EJH, EBW, and CMD performed research; BMG, EJH, RA, EBW, and YJC analyzed data; and BMG, EJH, CMD, and JMM designed the study.

Data used in this work can be accessed at the SBC LTER Watershed Data Collection repository: http://sbc.lternet.edu//data/dataCollectionsPortal.html.

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Goodridge, B.M., Hanan, E.J., Aguilera, R. et al. Retention of Nitrogen Following Wildfire in a Chaparral Ecosystem. Ecosystems 21, 1608–1622 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-018-0243-3

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