Tree cover and seasonal precipitation drive understorey flammability in alpine mountain forests

Journal of Biogeography

Volumn 43, Issue 9, 2016, Pages 1869-1880

  Fréjaville, Thibaut ^a,b   Curt, Thomas ^a   Carcaillet, Christopher ^b,c,d  

^a UR EMAX   (France)

^b PSL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY   (France)

^c UNIVERSITÉ LYON 1   (France)

^d LTER Zone Atelier Alpes   (France)

Author keywords

Fire intensity; flammability traits; FlamMap model; mountain forest fuel; pyrogeography; redundancy analysis

Indexed keywords

ALPINE ENVIRONMENT; CANOPY ARCHITECTURE; FIRE BEHAVIOR; MONTANE FOREST; MOUNTAIN ENVIRONMENT; PRECIPITATION ASSESSMENT; REGRESSION ANALYSIS; VEGETATION COVER;

ALPS;

CONIFEROPHYTA;

EID: 84977189150     PISSN: 03050270     EISSN: 13652699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/jbi.12745     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Aerts, R. (1997) Climate, leaf litter chemistry and leaf litter decomposition in terrestrial ecosystems: a triangular relationship. Oikos, 79, 439–449.
2. Anderson, H.E. (1970) Forest fuel ignitibility. Fire Technology, 6, 312–319.
3. Anderson, R.C., Loucks, O.L. & Swain, A.M. (1969) Herbaceous response to canopy cover, light intensity, and throughfall precipitation in coniferous forests. Ecology, 50, 255–263.
4. Andrews, P.L. (2012) Modeling wind adjustment factor and midflame wind speed for Rothermel's surface fire spread model. General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-266. USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fort Collins, CO.
5. Archibald, S., Roy, D.P., Van Wilgen, B.W. & Scholes, R.J. (2009) What limits fire? An examination of drivers of burnt area in southern Africa. Global Change Biology, 15, 613–630.
6. Behm, A.L., Duryea, M.L., Long, A.J. & Zipperer, W.C. (2004) Flammability of native understorey species in pine flatwood and hardwood hammock ecosystems and implications for the wildland–urban interface. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 13, 355–365.
7. Bessie, W.C. & Johnson, E.A. (1995) The relative importance of fuels and weather on fire behaviour in subalpine forests. Ecology, 76, 747–762.
8. Blanchet, F.G., Legendre, P. & Borcard, D. (2008) Forward selection of explanatory variables. Ecology, 89, 2623–2632.
9. Blarquez, O., Carcaillet, C., Elzein, T.M. & Roiron, P. (2012) Needle accumulation rate model-based reconstruction of palaeo-tree biomass in the western subalpine Alps. The Holocene, 22, 579–587.
10. Bond, W.J. & Keeley, J.E. (2005) Fire as a global ‘herbivore’: the ecology and evolution of flammable ecosystems. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 387–394.
11. Bond, W.J. & Van Wilgen, B.W. (1996) Fire and plants. Chapman and Hall, London.
12. Bowman, D.M.J.S., French, B.J. & Prior, L.D. (2014) Have plants evolved to self-immolate? Frontiers in Plant Science, 5, 59.
13. Bradstock, R.A. (2010) A biogeographic model of fire regimes in Australia: current and future implications. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 19, 145–158.
14. Brown, J.K., Oberheu, R.D. & Johnston, C.M. (1982) Handbook for inventorying surface fuels and biomass in the Interior West. General Technical Report INT-129. USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Ogden, UT.
15. Chauchard, S., Carcaillet, C. & Guibal, F. (2007) Patterns of land-use abandonment control tree-recruitment and forest dynamics in mediterranean mountains. Ecosystems, 10, 936–948.
16. R Core Team (2013) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna.
17. Cottenie, K. (2005) Integrating environmental and spatial processes in ecological community dynamics. Ecology Letters, 8, 1175–1182.
18. Curt, T., Schaffhauser, A., Borgniet, L., Dumas, C., Esteve, R., Ganteaume, A., Jappiot, M., Martin, W., N'Diaye, A. & Poilvet, B. (2011) Litter flammability in oak woodlands and shrublands of southeastern France. Forest Ecology and Management, 261, 2214–2222.
19. Dolédec, S., Chessel, D. & Gimaret-Carpentier, C. (2000) Niche separation in community analysis: a new method. Ecology, 81, 2914–2927.
20. Dray, S. & Dufour, A.-B. (2007) The ade4 package: implementing the duality diagram for ecologists. Journal of Statistical Software, 22, 1–20.
21. Engber, E.A. & Varner, J.M. (2012) Patterns of flammability of the California oaks: the role of leaf traits. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 42, 1965–1975.
22. Fernandes, P.M. & Cruz, M.G. (2012) Plant flammability experiments offer limited insight into vegetation–fire dynamics interactions. New Phytologist, 194, 606–609.
23. Finney, M.A. (2006) An overview of FlamMap fire modeling capabilities. Fuels management – how to measure success: conference proceedings (ed. by P.L. Andrews and B.W. Butler), pp. 213–220. Proceedings RMRS-P 41. USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fort Collins, CO.
24. Flannigan, M.D., Krawchuk, M.A., de Groot, W.J., Wotton, B.M. & Gowman, L.M. (2009) Implications of changing climate for global wildland fire. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 18, 483–507.
25. Fréjaville, T. & Curt, T. (2015) Spatiotemporal patterns of changes in fire regime and climate: defining the pyroclimates of south-eastern France (Mediterranean Basin). Climatic Change, 129, 239–251
26. Fréjaville, T., Curt, T. & Carcaillet, C. (2013) Bark flammability as a fire-response trait for subalpine trees. Frontiers in Plant Science, 4, 466.
27. Ganteaume, A., Jappiot, M., Lampin-Maillet, C., Curt, T. & Borgniet, L. (2011) Effects of vegetation type and fire regime on flammability of undisturbed litter in southeastern France. Forest Ecology and Management.
28. Genries, A., Morin, X., Chauchard, S. & Carcaillet, C. (2009) The function of surface fires in the dynamics and structure of a formerly grazed old subalpine forest. Journal of Ecology, 97, 728–741.
29. Gill, A.M. & Zylstra, P. (2005) Flammability of Australian forests. Australian Forestry, 68, 88–94.
30. Girardin, M.P., Ali, A.A., Carcaillet, C., Blarquez, O., Hély, C., Terrier, A., Genries, A. & Bergeron, Y. (2013) Vegetation limits the impact of a warm climate on boreal wildfires. New Phytologist, 199, 1001–1011.
31. Hachmi, M., Sesbou, A., Benjelloun, H. & Bouanane, F. (2011) Alternative equations to estimate the surface-to-volume ratio of different forest fuel particles. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 20, 648–656.
32. Hoffmann, W.A., Jaconis, S.Y., Mckinley, K.L., Geiger, E.L., Gotsch, S.G. & Franco, A.C. (2012) Fuels or microclimate? Understanding the drivers of fire feedbacks at savanna–forest boundaries. Austral Ecology, 37, 634–643.
33. Keane, R.E. (2008) Biophysical controls on surface fuel litterfall and decomposition in the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 38, 1431–1445.
34. Lavorel, S. & Garnier, E. (2002) Predicting changes in community composition and ecosystem functioning from plant traits: revisiting the Holy Grail. Functional Ecology, 16, 545–556.
35. Legendre, P. & Legendre, L. (2012) Numerical ecology. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
36. McRae, D.J., Alexander, M.E. & Stocks, B.J. (1979) Measurement and description of fuels and fire behaviour on prescribed burns: a handbook. Forest Technical Report O-X-287. Canadian Forestry Service, Great Lakes Forest Research Centre, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.
37. Meentemeyer, V., Box, E.O. & Thompson, R. (1982) World patterns and amounts of terrestrial plant litter production. BioScience, 32, 125–128.
38. Moritz, M.A., Parisien, M.-A., Batllori, E., Krawchuk, M.A., Van Dorn, J., Ganz, D.J. & Hayhoe, K. (2012) Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity. Ecosphere, 3, 49.
39. Nieto-Lugilde, D., Lenoir, J., Abdulhak, S., Aeschimann, D., Dullinger, S., Gégout, J.-C., Guisan, A., Pauli, H., Renaud, J., Theurillat, J.-P., Thuiller, W., Van Es, J., Vittoz, P., Willner, W., Wohlgemuth, T., Zimmermann, N.E. & Svenning, J.-C. (2015) Tree cover at fine and coarse spatial grains interacts with shade tolerance to shape plant species distributions across the Alps. Ecography, 38, 578–589.
40. Oksanen, J., Blanchet, F.G., Kindt, R., Legendre, P., O'Hara, R.B., Simpson, G.L., Solymos, P., Stevens, M.H.H. & Wagner, H. (2013) vegan: community ecology package. R package version 2.0-7. Available at: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vegan/index.html.
41. Papió, C. & Trabaud, L. (1991) Comparative study of the aerial structure of five shrubs of Mediterranean shrublands. Forest Science, 37, 146–159.
42. Parisien, M.-A. & Moritz, M.A. (2009) Environmental controls on the distribution of wildfire at multiple spatial scales. Ecological Monographs, 79, 127–154.
43. Paritsis, J., Holz, A., Veblen, T.T. & Kitzberger, T. (2013) Habitat distribution modeling reveals vegetation flammability and land use as drivers of wildfire in SW Patagonia. Ecosphere, 4, 53.
44. Pausas, J.G. & Paula, S. (2012) Fuel shapes the fire–climate relationship: evidence from Mediterranean ecosystems. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 21, 1074–1082.
45. Peres-Neto, P.R., Legendre, P., Dray, S. & Borcard, D. (2006) Variation partitioning of species data matrices: estimation and comparison of fractions. Ecology, 87, 2614–2625.
46. Podani, J. (2006) Braun–Blanquet's legacy and data analysis in vegetation science. Journal of Vegetation Science, 17, 113–117.
47. Ray, D., Nepstad, D. & Moutinho, P. (2005) Micrometeorological and canopy controls of fire susceptibility in a forested Amazon landscape. Ecological Applications, 15, 1664–1678.
48. Reichstein, M., Bahn, M., Mahecha, M.D., Kattge, J. & Baldocchi, D.D. (2014) Linking plant and ecosystem functional biogeography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111, 13697–13702.
49. Rother, M.T. & Grissino-Mayer, H.D. (2014) Climatic influences on fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests of the Zuni Mountains, NM, USA. Forest Ecology and Management, 322, 69–77.
50. Rothermel, R.C. (1972) A mathematical model for predicting fire spread in wildland fuels. Research Paper INT-115. USDA Forest Service, Ogden, UT.
51. Santana, V.M., Baeza, M.J. & Vallejo, V.R. (2011) Fuel structural traits modulating soil temperatures in different species patches of Mediterranean Basin shrublands. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 20, 668–677.
52. Schoennagel, T., Veblen, T.T. & Romme, W.H. (2004) The interaction of fire, fuels, and climate across Rocky Mountain forests. BioScience, 54, 661–676.
53. Scholes, R.J. (2003) Convex relationships in ecosystems containing mixtures of trees and grass. Environmental and Resource Economics, 26, 559–574.
54. Schwilk, D.W. & Caprio, A.C. (2011) Scaling from leaf traits to fire behaviour: community composition predicts fire severity in a temperate forest. Journal of Ecology, 99, 970–980.
55. Tasser, E. & Tappeiner, U. (2002) Impact of land use changes on mountain vegetation. Applied Vegetation Science, 5, 173–184.
56. Trauernicht, C., Murphy, B.P., Portner, T.E. & Bowman, D.M.J.S. (2012) Tree cover–fire interactions promote the persistence of a fire-sensitive conifer in a highly flammable savanna. Journal of Ecology, 100, 958–968.
57. Van Wagner, C.E. (1968) The line intersect method in forest fuel sampling. Forest Science, 14, 20–26.
58. Van Wagner, C.E. (1977) Conditions for the start and spread of crown fire. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 7, 23–34.
59. Van Wagner, C.E. (1987) Development and structure of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System. Forest Technical Report 35. Canadian Forestry Service, Ottawa.
60. Westerling, A.L., Hidalgo, H.G., Cayan, D.R. & Swetnam, T.W. (2006) Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity. Science, 313, 940–943.
61. Zumbrunnen, T., Bugmann, H., Conedera, M. & Bürgi, M. (2009) Linking forest fire regimes and climate: a historical analysis in a dry inner Alpine valley. Ecosystems, 12, 73–86.
62. Zumbrunnen, T., Menéndez, P., Bugmann, H., Conedera, M., Gimmi, U. & Bürgi, M. (2012) Human impacts on fire occurrence: a case study of hundred years of forest fires in a dry alpine valley in Switzerland. Regional Environmental Change, 12, 935–949.