Growing or dormant season burns: the effects of burn season on bee and plant communities

Decker, Brenna L.; Harmon‐Threatt, Alexandra N.

doi:10.1007/s10531-019-01840-6

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…However, this conclusion requires further investigation. We know that the season of controlled burning (e.g., in the dormant winter versus early spring) can alter its effect on bee habitat ( Decker and Harmon-Threatt 2019 ), and this study exclusively investigated spring burns. Thus, this work should be replicated following burns during other seasons.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within-Year Effects of Prescribed Fire on Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and Floral Resources

Tai

Kaldor

Urbina

et al. 2022

Journal of Insect Science

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Despite the importance of bumble bees (genus Bombus Latreille) for their services to natural and agricultural environments, we know little about the relationship between grassland management practices and bumble bee conservation. Prescribed fire is a common grassland maintenance tool, including in areas where endangered and threatened bumble bees are present. Thus, knowledge of the effects of prescribed fire on bumble bees is essential for designing management schemes that protect and bolster their populations. Using nonlethal surveys to record bumble bee species richness, abundance, and community composition, we evaluated the effects of spring controlled burns on summer bumble bee gynes and workers across five sites in southern Wisconsin. In addition, we explored the effects of fire on floral resources by measuring floral genus richness, abundance, ground cover, and proportion of transects containing blooming flowers in adjacent burned and unburned parcels. Prescribed fire had no measurable effects on bumble bee gyne or worker community composition, species richness, or abundance. However, consistent with previous studies prescribed fire increased floral genus richness and ground cover. The disconnect between bumble bee and floral responses to fire highlights some opportunities for improving our understanding of fire’s effects on bumble bee diapause, nest site choice, and foraging.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within-Year Effects of Prescribed Fire on Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and Floral Resources

Tai

Kaldor

Urbina

et al. 2022

Journal of Insect Science

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“…Generally, prairie forbs flower between July and October (Curtis 1959), and seeded species followed this trend in our plots, producing the highest seasonal floral density and diversity late in the summer. The limited early-season floral density recorded in our plots could have been due to the poor competitive ability of selected early-blooming species, a lack of management practices that focus on promoting early-season-flowering prairie species (Howe 1994, Decker andHarmon-Threatt 2019), or replacement by quickly colonizing native and non-native adventive flowering plant species. Many old field habitats are dominated by non-native flowering plants early in the season (Reeb et al 2020), suggesting that establishing native plants for early spring pollinators may be a challenge in constructed pollinator habitat on various types of disturbed grasslands and not just on reclaimed mine landscapes.…”

Section: Flowering Plant Richnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ten‐year trends reveal declining quality of seeded pollinator habitat on reclaimed mines regardless of seed mix diversity

Lybbert

Cusser

Hung

et al. 2021

Ecological Applications

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Plant–pollinator interactions represent a crucial ecosystem function threatened by anthropogenic landscape changes. Disturbances that reduce plant diversity are associated with floral resource and pollinator declines. Establishing wildflower plantings is a major conservation strategy targeting pollinators, the success of which depends on long‐term persistence of seeded floral communities. However, most pollinator‐oriented seeding projects are monitored for a few years, making it difficult to evaluate the longevity of such interventions. Selecting plant species to provide pollinators diverse arrays of floral resources throughout their activity season is often limited by budgetary constraints and other conservation priorities. To evaluate the long‐term persistence of prairie vegetation seeded to support pollinators, we sowed wildflower seed mixes into plots on a degraded reclaimed strip‐mine landscape in central Ohio, USA. We examined how pollinator habitat quality, measured as floral abundance and diversity, changed over 10 years (2009–2019) in the absence of management, over the course of the blooming season within each year, and across three seed mixes containing different numbers and combinations of flowering plant species. Seeded species floral abundance declined by more than 75% over the study, with the largest decline occurring between the fifth and seventh summers. Native and non‐native adventive flowering plants quickly colonized the plots and represented >50% of floral community abundances on average. Floral richness remained relatively constant throughout the study, with a small peak one year after plot establishment. Plots seeded with High‐Diversity Mixes averaged two or three more species per plot compared with a Low‐Diversity Mix, despite having been seeded with twice as many plant species. Within years, the abundance and diversity of seeded species were lowest early in the blooming season and increased monotonically from June to August. Adventive species exhibited the opposite trend, such that complementary abundance patterns of seeded and adventive species blooms resulted in a relatively constant floral abundance across the growing season. Seeded plant communities followed classic successional patterns in which annual species quickly established and flowered but were replaced by perennial species after the first few summers. Long‐term data on establishment and persistence of flower species can guide species selection for future‐oriented pollinator habitat restorations.

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“…Prescribed fire and grazing are used to create a mosaic of areas of varying plant composition and vegetation structure because plant functional groups vary in their response to these ecosystem disturbances [74][75][76]. Prescribed burns increase wild bee abundance and richness though grazing generally has the opposite effect [77,78], suggesting that maintaining a spatial and temporal mosaic of management is recommended for the bee as well as plant communities in this system.…”

Section: Management Of Restoration For Pollinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of the challenges and opportunities for restoring animal-mediated pollination of native plants

Cariveau

Bruninga‐Socolar

Pardee

2020

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences

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Ecological restoration is increasingly implemented to reverse habitat loss and concomitant declines in biological diversity. Typically, restoration success is evaluated by measuring the abundance and/or diversity of a single taxon. However, for a restoration to be successful and persistent, critical ecosystem functions such as animal-mediated pollination must be maintained. In this review, we focus on three aspects of pollination within ecological restorations. First, we address the need to measure pollination directly in restored habitats. Proxies such as pollinator abundance and richness do not always accurately assess pollination function. Pollen supplementation experiments, pollen deposition studies, and pollen transport networks are more robust methods for assessing pollination function within restorations. Second, we highlight how local-scale management and landscape-level factors may influence pollination within restorations. Local-scale management actions such as prescribed fire and removal of non-native species can have large impacts on pollinator communities and ultimately on pollination services. In addition, landscape context including proximity and connectivity to natural habitats may be an important factor for land managers and conservation practitioners to consider to maximize restoration success. Third, as climate change is predicted to be a primary driver of future loss in biodiversity, we discuss the potential effects climate change may have on animal-mediated pollination within restorations. An increased mechanistic understanding of how climate change affects pollination and incorporation of climate change predictions will help practitioners design stable, functioning restorations into the future.

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Growing or dormant season burns: the effects of burn season on bee and plant communities

Cited by 19 publications

References 38 publications

Within-Year Effects of Prescribed Fire on Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and Floral Resources

Within-Year Effects of Prescribed Fire on Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and Floral Resources

Ten‐year trends reveal declining quality of seeded pollinator habitat on reclaimed mines regardless of seed mix diversity

A review of the challenges and opportunities for restoring animal-mediated pollination of native plants

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