Winners and losers: post-fire European forest taxa abundance meta-1 analysis

Gerber, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8722-3113 (2025). Winners and losers: post-fire European forest taxa abundance meta-1 analysis. Research Square 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8214448/v1. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Background: Climate change is intensifying wildfire regimes across European forests, from Mediterranean to temperate and boreal biomes, creating urgent management challenges. Fire acts as a powerful selective filter with highly variable, context-dependent effects, yet a taxonomically comprehensive synthesis quantifying fire impacts on abundance across European forests remains absent. Regional understanding is critical because European forests have distinctive ecological characteristics and management histories compared to more extensively studied fire-prone ecosystems.

Results: We conducted a PRISMA-aligned systematic review and meta-analysis of 29 studies (n = 2192 effect sizes) to assess how fire characteristics (type, severity, time since fire) and environmental context (ecoregion, biome) affect taxa across European forests, focusing exclusively on abundance as a direct indicator of population response to disturbance. Taxonomic identity emerged as the strongest predictor of post-fire responses. Fire-sensitive taxa (Gastropoda, Passeriformes, bryophytes) showed severe declines, bryophytes even at low fire severity, while fire-opportunistic taxa (Hemiptera, Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, some vascular plants) showed dramatic increases, particularly after high-severity fires and during one to five years post-fire. Mediterranean forests showed less negative overall responses than temperate and boreal forests, yet fire-sensitive taxa declined severely even there. Critical data gaps, especially absence of prescribed fire data for fire-sensitive taxa and limited post-fire recovery monitoring, constrain management guidance. High residual heterogeneity indicated unmeasured factors (burn frequency, fire seasonality, microhabitat complexity, refugia availability, functional traits) play significant but inconsistently reported roles.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrate ecological trade-offs: fire regimes benefiting fire-opportunistic taxa devastate fire-sensitive taxa. As climate change drives novel fire regimes across Europe, evidence-based fire management requires landscape-scale strategies incorporating spatial heterogeneity, refugia conservation, and explicit consideration of taxonomic trade-offs. However, critical data limitations constrain robust management guidance. Standardized, long-term monitoring protocols across successional stages, fire events, and taxonomic groups, functional traits, consistent reporting of fire characteristics, microhabitat complexity, refugia availability, is essential. Combined with improved data sharing, this will enable adaptive management frameworks that balance wildfire risk reduction with biodiversity conservation in an era of unprecedented fire regime change.

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