Abstract
Peatland margins are a distinct ecotone especially vulnerable to deep smouldering in the Boreal Plains because they can experience greater water table drawdown during dry periods compared to peatland middles. Margin recovery trajectories have potentially important implications for wildfire behaviour as both the rate of vegetation recovery and community composition control fuel load and flammability. We compared peatland margin and middle vegetation trajectories using a chronosequence of time-since-fire in boreal Alberta, Canada. Margins had unique post-fire indicator species, with a higher broadleaf cover and limited Sphagnum moss colonization. Middles and margins became less distinct with greater time-since-fire, where both were dominated by feathermoss as canopy closure increased. High burn severity in margins can expose the seedbank in the underlying mineral soil to favourable conditions, causing rapid accumulation of broadleaf aboveground biomass and limiting Sphagnum establishment. The rapid accumulation of aboveground biomass increases potential fuel load, while exclusion of Sphagnum increases future smouldering potential given the dense peat in the margin ecotone. However, the dominance of deciduous vegetation for several decades post fire would serve to limit wildfire compared to a conifer-dominated system, particularly post leaf-out. Thus, peatland margins could represent a positive feedback to peat carbon loss for early season fires and a negative feedback for post leaf-out fires due to the interplay between fuel load, fire seasonality, and species flammability. Characterization of margins as distinct ecotones with a separate vegetation structure and species composition from peatland middles provides critical insight about wildfire vulnerability and carbon storage in the Boreal Plains.
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Data availability
The datasets used for the analyses and figures presented in the current study are available in the Zenodo repository, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8247316. This includes species abundance data, canopy openness, and biomass data.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Rebekah Ingram, Cameron McCann, Kelly Biagi, and Samantha Stead for assistance in the field and Craig Allison (GIS), Kayla Wong, and Nicole Sandler for assistance in the lab. We thank Drs. Merritt Turetsky and Richard Petrone for comments on a previous version of the manuscript. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which helped to improve the manuscript.
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This research was funded by an NSERC CRD Grant (477235–2014) through a partnership with Syncrude Canada Ltd. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. to JMW.
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Funding was secured by JMW. Research was designed by KMM, PAM, SLW, and JMW, data analysis was undertaken by KMM, PAM, and SLW and writing was conducted by KMM, PAM, SLW, HJMG, and JMW.
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13157_2024_1794_MOESM1_ESM.eps
Supplementary file1 Figure S1 Pairwise comparison of tree/shrub biomass between middle and margin plots across three hydrogeological settings (EPS 57 KB)
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Supplementary file2 Figure S2 Moss vegetation community with time since fire. Individual points represent site-averaged values of abundance for each group. Curves are smoothed splines fit to true mosses (solid), feather mosses (dashed), and sphagnum (dot-dashed) (EPS 155 KB)
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Mayner, K.M., Moore, P.A., Wilkinson, S.L. et al. Differential Post-Fire Vegetation Recovery of Boreal Plains Bogs and Margins. Wetlands 44, 44 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-024-01794-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-024-01794-8