Short- and Mid-Term Spatiotemporal Diversity Patterns of Post-Fire Insect-Pollinated Plant Communities in the Mediterranean

Georgios Nakas (), Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis and Theodora Petanidou
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Georgios Nakas: Laboratory of Biogeography and Ecology, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, 81100 Μytilene, Greece
Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis: Laboratory of Botany, Department of Biology, Division of Plant Biology, University of Patras, 26504 Rio, Greece
Theodora Petanidou: Laboratory of Biogeography and Ecology, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, 81100 Μytilene, Greece

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-13

Abstract: In the Mediterranean, one of the most fire-prone regions in the world, wildfires are considered a key factor in vegetation distribution, structure, and function. Severe or frequent fires can lead to homogenized plant communities and habitat fragmentation with significant consequences for the ecosystem and plant-dependent animals such as pollinators. Herein, we present the results of a 10-year post-fire study (2013–2022) conducted on Chios Island, Greece. We explored the effects of a large-scale fire on beta diversity patterns of the flowering insect-pollinated plant communities and its turnover and nestedness components in both burned and unburned sites. In addition, we investigated whether the recorded differences in the burned and unburned plant communities were a result of species gains or losses in the post-fire years. Burned communities display higher post-fire beta diversity compared to the unburned ones, due to higher species turnover across all years of reference. Species turnover was highest overall in the burned sites during the second post-fire year and decreased a decade later. In conclusion, Mediterranean flowering insect-pollinated plant communities are rather fire-resilient, implying positive impacts on pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interactions during regeneration after a wildfire.

Keywords: beta diversity; fire ecology; post-fire succession; entomophilous plants; plant ecology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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