Ectomycorrhizal community responses to recurring prescribed fires in yellow pine forests: Effects of fire intervals and season
A. K. OLIVER (1), S. P. Brown (1), M. Callaham (2), A. Jumpponen (3). (1) Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, U.S.A.; (2) USDA Forest Service, Athens, GA, U.S.A.; (3) Division of Biology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, U.S.A.
Prescribed fire is a common management tool to reduce fuel loads in forested ecosystems. However, the long-term prescribed fire effects on ectomycorrhizal (ECM) communities remain largely unknown – particularly so in southeastern United States. Using next generation sequencing, this study takes advantage of a long-term experiment established in 1988 in the Hitchiti national forest in Georgia to elucidate the ECM community responses to recurring fire and season of the burn in southern yellow pine stands. The experimental includes unburned control treatment as well as 2 year, 3 year, and 6 year burn regimes with 3 year burns occurring either during the winter or summer in four replicate 0.8 ha plots. Our data show that, while community richness and diversity are relatively stable, short fire intervals maintain ECM communities different from those in unburned controls. This is largely a result of a limited number of taxa correlating strongly with the long fire intervals. Our data provides the basis for optimizing the fire frequencies to sustain ECM communities in the long term in this southern coniferous forest ecosystem.
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