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Prescribed fire and partial overstory removal alter an acorn-rodent conditional mutualism.
Greenler, Skye M; Estrada, Laura A; Kellner, Kenneth F; Saunders, Michael R; Swihart, Robert K.
Afiliação
  • Greenler SM; Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, 715 W. State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA.
  • Estrada LA; Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, 715 W. State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA.
  • Kellner KF; Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, 715 W. State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA.
  • Saunders MR; Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, 715 W. State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA.
  • Swihart RK; Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, 715 W. State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907, USA.
Ecol Appl ; 29(7): e01958, 2019 10.
Article em En | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31240798
ABSTRACT
In eastern North America, oak (Quercus) regeneration failure has spurred management using silvicultural approaches better aligned with the autecology of oaks. In particular, shelterwood harvests can create favorable intermediate light conditions for oak establishment and prescribed fire is predicted (by the oak-fire hypothesis) to favor oak regeneration. These approaches substantially modify forest structure and may affect crucial trophic interactions including the conditional mutualism between oaks and granivorous rodents that scatterhoard acorns, which shifts along a continuum from antagonistic to mutualistic depending on external factors. We investigated how overwinter survival and dispersal of northern red oak (Quercus rubra) acorns were influenced by location within or outside of group shelterwood harvests (small canopy gaps created throughout an intact forest stand) with and without prescribed fire. We conducted two concurrent experiments to test (1) dispersal and survival of acorns presented on the forest floor and (2) acorn pilferage rates from caches that mimic squirrel scatterhoards in shelterwood gap/group interiors, edges, and the uncut forest matrix in burned and unburned forest stands. In both experiments, acorn survival was generally higher in burned than unburned stands. Acorn survival from forest floor presentations was higher in the unharvested forest matrix than harvest gap interiors; however, there was no effect of proximity to harvest gaps on survival of cached acorns. Survival of cached acorns was associated with understory vegetative cover (-), coarse woody debris cover (-), and distance to nearest tree (+), but uncorrelated with canopy cover above the cache. Our results suggest that reduced understory cover following prescribed fire may increase perceived habitat riskiness for granivores resulting in higher acorn survival up to 2 yr post-fire. These findings unify the oak-fire and oak-granivore conditional mutualism hypotheses, and suggest that the environmental conditions following prescribed fire and group shelterwood harvests may shift the oak-granivore conditional mutualism in a direction beneficial for oak regeneration.
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Texto completo: 1 Coleções: 01-internacional Base de dados: MEDLINE Assunto principal: Quercus / Incêndios Tipo de estudo: Prognostic_studies Limite: Animals Idioma: En Ano de publicação: 2019 Tipo de documento: Article

Texto completo: 1 Coleções: 01-internacional Base de dados: MEDLINE Assunto principal: Quercus / Incêndios Tipo de estudo: Prognostic_studies Limite: Animals Idioma: En Ano de publicação: 2019 Tipo de documento: Article