Exploring Prescribed Fire Severity Effects on Ground Beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) Taxonomic and Functional Community Composition

Abstract

Prescribed fire is a management tool that is frequently used to foster biodiversity. Simultaneously, insects that provide essential ecosystem services are globally declining. Within the pyroentomology literature, there are mixed reports of positive and negative effects that prescribed fires have on insect communities. This is likely due to not accounting for fire heterogeneity created by fire severity. To better understand prescribed fire severity effects on insect communities, we used multispectral reflectance data collected by Sentinel-2 to methodically quantify prescribed fire severity and compared ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) taxonomic and functional community composition responses between an unburned site and two burned sites with contrasting fire impacts. We found 23 ground beetle species and used 30 morphological, physiological, phenological, and ecological functional traits for each species. We found that our moderate fire severity site had different taxonomic and functional community compositions from both our unburned and high-severity sites. Surprisingly, we did not find a strong difference in taxonomic or functional ground beetle composition between our unburned and high-severity sites. Our results encourage future pyroentomology studies to account for fire severity, which will help guide conservation managers to make more accurate decisions and predictions about prescribed fire effects on insect biodiversity.

Keywords

• conservation management
• fire effects
• pyroentomology
• forest restoration
• pine barrens
• pinelands