Faculty Seminar Series: Long-term Fire and Biodiversity Dynamics in Subalpine Forests of the Alps
Or how climate components (precipitation, season) and human activities have controlled subalpine fire regimes since 21,000 years, which interacted ultimately with vegetation (feedbacks) through plant community diversity and fuel.
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Department of Life and Earth Sciences
April 9, 2019 | 12 pm, CAWP Caseroom
Light lunch provided for the first 60 attendees
The lecture will summarize the highlights of 25 years of research in the French and Italian Alps. It will first introduce the great functional and phylogenetic similarities between Alpine and Rocky Mountain ecosystems. Second, the lecture will present the biological proxies selected for vegetation dynamics research and ultimately provide reconstructions applying paleoecological and ecological inferences to improved, and more sustainable management of forest ecosystems. The ecosystem reconstructions are quantitative and intelligible to forest managers, not only being indicative of qualitative trajectories. The long-term scenarios are thus based on fire frequency, forest biomass and measurements of community diversity. Third, the lecture will demonstrate how forest plant diversity interacted with disturbance (fire) in the long term at different community levels, based on results at stand (alpha-diversity), landscape, and regional scales. The lecture will also provide evidence of fire frequency variability before and after the first development of prehistoric farming in high mountain forests and the connection with climate and woody biomass. Finally, the lecture will show how forest biodiversity interplayed with fire regime mostly via the functional effect of fire on tree regeneration mortality.