Does post-fire salvage logging affect foraging activity by rodents?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Does post‑fire salvage logging affect foraging activity by rodents? Roger Puig‑Gironès1 · Louis Imbeau2 · Miguel Clavero3 · Josep Rost1,4 · Pere Pons1 Received: 23 August 2019 / Revised: 12 February 2020 / Accepted: 23 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Following wildfires, salvage logging is applied for silvicultural, safety or even aesthetic reasons. Such operations impact on biological legacies, impair natural vegetation recovery and may affect several animal species that depend on vegetation structure and specific plant resources. Rodents, such as wood and Algerian mice, use vegetation cover as protection against predators and are important prey, moderately effective seed dispersers and efficient seed predators. Different post-fire management strategies may either promote rodent abundance, enhancing their key biological roles, or result in low rodent abundance, creating a low seed predation window of opportunity when assisted regeneration of burnt forests is required. In order to evaluate the effects of post-fire salvage logging on plant-animal interactions, we compared plant regeneration, the availability of trophic resources (seeds and fleshy fruits), rodent foraging activity and rodent relative abundance between unlogged and logged burnt pine forests in the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula at different distances (up to 700 m) from the burnt area perimeter. The results show that vegetation recovered more slowly in salvage logged than in unlogged areas. Foraging activity of rodents increased both with the volume of woody debris, mainly derived from salvage logging, and with increasing foliage cover. Management strategies aimed at promoting the presence of rodents and associated biodiversity can, however, hamper assisted regeneration by seed sowing. Keywords Forest management · Habitat structure · Rodents · Foraging activity · Salvage logging · Wildfire
Introduction Wildfire is an increasingly important factor for biodiversity conservation and natural resource management (Kelly and Brotons 2017). After a forest fire, burnt trees are usually removed in a process called salvage logging, due to Communicated by Gediminas Brazaitis. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-020-01285-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Roger Puig‑Gironès [email protected] 1
Departament de Ciències Ambientals, University of Girona, 17003 Girona, Catalonia, Spain
2
Institut de Recherche sur les Forêts (IRF), Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), 445 Boulevard de l’université, Rouyn‑Noranda, QC J9X 5E4, Canada
3
Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC), Seville, Spain
4
Universitat de Vic - Universitat Central de Catalunya, Vic, Spain
silvicultural, safety or even aesthetic reasons (Mavsar et al. 2012; Müller et al. 2018). The ecological consequences of post-fire salvage logging have been the subject of intense discussion in the
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