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Fire-driven alien invasion in a fire-adapted ecosystem

  • Community ecology - Original research
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Abstract

Disturbance plays a key role in many alien plant invasions. However, often the main driver of invasion is not disturbance per se but alterations in the disturbance regime. In some fire-adapted shrublands, the community is highly resilient to infrequent, high-intensity fires, but changes in the fire regime that result in shorter fire intervals may make these communities more susceptible to alien plant invasions. This study examines several wildfire events that resulted in short fire intervals in California chaparral shrublands. In one study, we compared postfire recovery patterns in sites with different prefire stand ages (3 and 24 years), and in another study we compared sites that had burned once in four years with sites that had burned twice in this period. The population size of the dominant native shrub Adenostoma fasciculatum was drastically reduced following fire in the 3-year sites relative to the 24-year sites. The 3-year sites had much greater alien plant cover and significantly lower plant diversity than the 24-year sites. In a separate study, repeat fires four years apart on the same sites showed that annual species increased significantly after the second fire, and alien annuals far outnumbered native annuals. Aliens included both annual grasses and annual forbs and were negatively correlated with woody plant cover. Native woody species regenerated well after the first fire but declined after the second fire, and one obligate seeding shrub was extirpated from two sites by the repeat fires. It is concluded that some fire-adapted shrublands are vulnerable to changes in fire regime, and this can lead to a loss of native diversity and put the community on a trajectory towards type conversion from a woody to an herbaceous system. Such changes result in alterations in the proportion of natives to non-natives, changes in functional types from deeply rooted shrubs to shallow rooted grasses and forbs, increased fire frequency due to the increase in fine fuels, and changes in carbon storage.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Anne Pfaff for GIS assistance. Thanks also to the outstanding effort of our field crews: Darren Kane, Paul Schuette, Meghan Blair, Maya Mazon, Christa Zacharias, Mark Montygierd, Catherine Langenfeld, Nora Brunnell, and Ivy Watson. We acknowledge support from the USDA/DOI Joint Fire Science Program and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). Any use of trade, product, or firm names in this publication is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, Sequoia-Kings Canyon Field Station, Three Rivers, CA, 93271, USA

    Jon E. Keeley & Teresa J. Brennan

  2. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Jon E. Keeley

Authors
  1. Jon E. Keeley
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  2. Teresa J. Brennan
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Correspondence to Jon E. Keeley.

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Communicated by Peter Clarke.

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Keeley, J.E., Brennan, T.J. Fire-driven alien invasion in a fire-adapted ecosystem. Oecologia 169, 1043–1052 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-012-2253-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-012-2253-8

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