Version 1
: Received: 31 October 2022 / Approved: 3 November 2022 / Online: 3 November 2022 (02:27:45 CET)
Version 2
: Received: 2 May 2023 / Approved: 4 May 2023 / Online: 4 May 2023 (02:51:32 CEST)
García-Redondo, C.; Fernández-Moure, P.; Cánibe, M.; Tapia, L.; Gil-Carrera, A.; Lombao, A.; Díaz-Raviña, M.; Regos, A. Burn Severity and Land-Use Legacy Influence Bird Abundance in the Atlantic-Mediterranean Biogeographic Transition. Environmental Research 2023, 116510, doi:10.1016/j.envres.2023.116510.
García-Redondo, C.; Fernández-Moure, P.; Cánibe, M.; Tapia, L.; Gil-Carrera, A.; Lombao, A.; Díaz-Raviña, M.; Regos, A. Burn Severity and Land-Use Legacy Influence Bird Abundance in the Atlantic-Mediterranean Biogeographic Transition. Environmental Research 2023, 116510, doi:10.1016/j.envres.2023.116510.
García-Redondo, C.; Fernández-Moure, P.; Cánibe, M.; Tapia, L.; Gil-Carrera, A.; Lombao, A.; Díaz-Raviña, M.; Regos, A. Burn Severity and Land-Use Legacy Influence Bird Abundance in the Atlantic-Mediterranean Biogeographic Transition. Environmental Research 2023, 116510, doi:10.1016/j.envres.2023.116510.
García-Redondo, C.; Fernández-Moure, P.; Cánibe, M.; Tapia, L.; Gil-Carrera, A.; Lombao, A.; Díaz-Raviña, M.; Regos, A. Burn Severity and Land-Use Legacy Influence Bird Abundance in the Atlantic-Mediterranean Biogeographic Transition. Environmental Research 2023, 116510, doi:10.1016/j.envres.2023.116510.
Abstract
Fire regimes in mountain landscapes of southern Europe have been shifting from their baselines due to the accumulation of fuel fostered by long-standing rural abandonment and fire exclusion policies. Understanding the role of fire on biodiversity is paramount to implement adequate management to mitigate the impacts of altered fire regimes and land abandonment on biodiversity. Here, we explored to what extent the spatiotemporal variation in burn severity has affected bird abundance of a mountain abandoned landscape located in the Atlantic-Mediterranean transition (NW Iberia). We took advantage of: (1) satellite images of Sentinel 2 and Landsat missions to compute burn severity indicators from 2010 to 2020, and (2) standardized bird surveys carried out over 206 point-counts along the breeding season of 2021. Bird abundance models were built from burn severity metrics together with well-known fire regime attributes (% of burnt area and time since fire). Our results showed that the spatiotemporal variation of burn severity significantly correlated with the abundance of the 39% of the modeled species, supporting the role of pyro-diversity in driving bird populations in our region. The burnt area also explained abundance patterns for 28% of species. Time since fire only correlated with the abundance of 3 species. Our findings confirm the importance of incorporating burn severity indicators into the toolkit of decision makers to anticipate the response of birds to fire management.
Keywords
Burnt severity index; bird responses; generalized linear models; fire recurrency; time since last fire; Sentinel 2, Landsat satellite mission
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Environmental Science
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
