Collaborative Research: Adapting disturbance management to future climate in a fire-prone ecosystem: does response of an at-risk species indicate biodiversity effects?

The project will test how fire affects biodiversity in fire-prone ecosystems. Disturbance is important in maintaining species diversity in most ecosystems. Fire is a common disturbance that occurs in many systems such as longleaf pine savannas.

Although research has tested the effects of fire on biodiversity, little is known about how climate change might alter these effects. For example, longer or more intense droughts might reduce population recovery after a fire. This project will test how fire frequency affects biodiversity and how climate change might modify fire effects in the future.

Conservation of threatened ecosystems such as longleaf pine savannas requires the ability to predict how populations will change in the future. Longleaf pine savannas are home to many threatened plants and animals like the Venus flytrap and red-cockaded woodpecker. This project will provide recommendations for prescribed burns in longleaf pine savannas and will create a web-based tool for land managers in the southeastern U.S. that will help them make conservation plans.

Additionally, the project will train graduate and undergraduate students in ecology and conservation.

The project will explicitly test predictions that the optimal fire management strategy for Venus flytraps will differ in a future climate. These predictions were constructed using data collected under ambient variation in climate and fire regimes, rather than extreme values of climate consistent with future climate change, or experimental manipulations of fire that disentangle correlations between historical fire frequency and current fire effects.

Using demographic data on Venus flytraps collected from almost-factorial manipulations of fire frequency, drought, and warming conducted across a broad geographic area, the PIs aim to construct a climate- and fire-driven integral projection model that explicitly includes site-specific effects. We will validate the model using independently collected abundance data on fire and climate effects.

The proposed work will also estimate the degree to which Venus flytraps can be used as an indicator species, where a good indicator is one that accurately predicts changes in abundance of other species in response to fire and climate, rather than simply the presence of other species or of high levels of biodiversity. Assessing the indicator potential of Venus flytraps will help conservation managers identify fire frequencies that could bolster biodiversity or abundances of species of concern.

These efforts will culminate in generalizable insights underlying disturbance management in a future climate and the development of a framework for assessing the utility of indicator species.

This project is jointly funded by the Divisions of Environmental Biology and Integrative Organismal Systems through the Partnership to Advance Conservation Science and Practice Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.