Impacts of prescribed fire in vegetation and edaphic macrofauna in a forest area

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Caio Braga
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/28380
• topic: Soil macrofauna; Flora; Solis; Nature conservation

Prescribed fire is commonly used as a land management tool to enhance and maintain habitats and to mitigate wildfire risk. However, their beneficial/detrimental role in forest structure and the consequences for forest-dwelling biota is not consensual. Hence, this study aimed to assess the impact of prescribed fire in the flora and in the soil edaphic community, and to understand their evolution since the fire occurrence. This study was conducted in Baldio de Carvalhais, a private land managed by the Montis association, which was divided in four sub-areas: three areas that were managed with prescribed fire (4 months, 1 and 2 years ago); and one fourth that was not burnt recently. The data collected in each sub-area included the soil pH, electrical conductivity (EC) and organic matter (OM), as well as the composition and structure of the flora and the edaphic macrofauna. The results showed lower OM values and slightly lower pH values in the sub-areas that burnt more recently. The EC only presented lower values in the sub-area burnt recently. Regarding the vegetation, this study highlights the role of prescribed fire in promoting their diversity, the abundance, species richness and evenness of the plants. Also, the use of natural engineering seems to have contributed to an increase in abundance and diversity of the flora in one of the sub-areas. In an opposite trend, the edaphic macrofauna decrease in their richness and evenness due to the fire. This study also revealed that with the time since the fire occurrence, the flora and edaphic macrofauna in the burnt sub-areas are recovering and approaching the unburned area. Nevertheless, more temporal studies and more soil parameters are required to better insight into the impacts of prescribed burning in the ecosystem functions and their services.