Invertebrate community response to fire and rodent activity in the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts.

ABSTRACT: Recent increases in the frequency and size of desert wildfires bring into question the impacts of fire on desert invertebrate communities. Furthermore, consumer communities can strongly impact invertebrates through predation and top-down effects on plant community assembly. We experimentally applied burn and rodent exclusion treatments in a full factorial design at sites in both the Mojave and Great Basin deserts to examine the impact that fire and rodent consumers have on invertebrate communities. Pitfall traps were used to survey invertebrates from April through September 2016 to determine changes in abundance, richness, and diversity of invertebrate communities in response to fire and rodent treatments. Generally speaking, rodent exclusion had very little effect on invertebrate abundanc

SUBMITTER: Day JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6540666 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature