Post-fire recruitment, microbial communities and ecosystem shifts in the Boreal forest

An increasing number of extreme boreal wildfires are leading to greater carbon (C) emissions, affecting the Earth’s climate. Post-fire recruitment of tree seedlings is key for sustaining ecosystem functioning, C cycling and C storage. While wildfires may increase plant productivity, they can also drive shifts in vegetation composition.

It remains unclear if tree recruitments and productivity will change due to changes in fire regimes, potentially weakening the boreal forest C sink.

Soil microbial processes are additional factors known to impact post-fire recruitment, and the capacity of forest recovery. In 2014, Sweden experienced the largest, unusually intense and most severe fire in modern history.

Here, we are going to capitalize on an infrastructure of plots of differing fire severity set up immediately after the fire to understand how this new type of fire regime affects forest regeneration pathways and aboveground and belowground C accumulation.

We have gathered researchers with expertise in forest regeneration, fire ecology and soil microbial communities, and propose to investigate post-fire recovery of vegetation and soil microbial communities in 2025.

We will set up a field experiment to understand how soil biota-mediated interactions between trees and soil respond to fire severity and determine forest recovery.

The research will provide new knowledge on long-term recruitment processes and impacts of wildfire severity on forest resilience and recovery in Sweden.