Long‐Term Impacts of Post‐Fire Mulching on Ground‐Dwelling Arthropod Communities in a Eucalypt Plantation

Abstract

In the past decades, Portugal like several other Mediterranean countries has been affected by frequent wildfires. This has led to various field tests of post‐fire soil conservation measures and, in particular, mulching with forest slash residues. While forest residue mulching was shown to be highly effective in reducing post‐fire erosion, its side effects on soil fauna communities have not been studied and are also difficult to predict from the – scarce – literature on mulch effects in general. Therefore, this study compared the abundance, diversity and taxonomic and functional composition of the ground‐dwelling arthropod communities of three mulched and, as control, three untreated erosion plots of roughly 100 m2 that had been installed in a eucalypt plantation almost immediately after a wildfire in 2010, some five years earlier. This was done using three pitfall traps per plot, placed at the lower, middle and upper part of the study slope. Roughly five years after mulching, its impacts on the ground‐dwelling arthropod were rather limited, especially compared to its effect on overall soil erosion rates. One of the few exceptions was the abundance of the Hymenoptera – one of the most frequently occurring orders – which was significantly lower in the mulched than control plots. This and other near significant mulching impacts found in this study plainly justify a follow‐up study on short‐term effects. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Early colonization of constructed Technosols by macro-invertebrates

“…We show that constructed Technosols as the ones investigated can host numerous macro-invertebrates rapidly after construction. This is in accordance with knowledge about macrofauna recolonization abilities (de Araújo et al 2015;Puga et al 2016). The results fall within the range of previous works on (re)colonization by soil fauna.…”

Effects of two emergency stabilization treatments on main soil properties four years after application in a severely burnt area

“…For these advantages, mulches are employed as an emergency hillslope treatment in the USA from the 1980s when downstream values (waterbodies, protected areas, roads, ...) are at high risk (Bautista et al, 2009;Robichaud et al, 2013). More recently, post-fire mulching has started to be used in some European countries (Gómez-Rey et al, 2013a;Puga et al, 2017;Vega et al, 2014). Mulch is recommended for severely burnt areas with slopes below 65%, not exposed to strong winds and without sensitive or rare plants (Bautista et al, 2009;Napper, 2006;Wagenbrenner et al, 2006).…”

Mulching-induced preservation of soil organic matter quality in a burnt eucalypt plantation in central Portugal

“…Possible side-effects of post-fire mulching, however, have been studied less frequently, with mulching impacts on fauna (Puga et al, 2017) having received clearly less attention than their impacts on post-fire vegetation recovery (e,g, Fernández and Vega, 2014;Keizer et al, 2018;Kruse et al, 2004). Also the effects of mulching on SOM quantity and quality are poorly studied for burnt soils, even if it is widely recognized that the applied mulch may represent an important input of OM, (partly) compensating the direct losses by combustion.…”