Fire severity filters regeneration traits to shape community assembly in Alaska's boreal forest.

ABSTRACT: Disturbance can both initiate and shape patterns of secondary succession by affecting processes of community assembly. Thus, understanding assembly rules is a key element of predicting ecological responses to changing disturbance regimes. We measured the composition and trait characteristics of plant communities early after widespread wildfires in Alaska to assess how variations in disturbance characteristics influenced the relative success of different plant regeneration strategies. We compared patterns of post-fire community composition and abundance of regeneration traits across a range of fire severities within a single pre-fire forest type- black spruce forests of Interior Alaska. Patterns of community composition, as captured by multivariate ordination with nonmetric multidimensional

SUBMITTER: Hollingsworth TN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3572144 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature