Wildfires are a major ecological driver impacting terrestrial ecosystems, yet their belowground impacts remain poorly understood in Central European temperate forests. We investigated soil microbial responses during the first post-fire year following the large 2022 wildfire in the Bohemian and Saxon Switzerland National Parks (Czechia and Germany). We compared soil microbial communities across three forest types differing in fire sensitivity (Fagus sylvatica, Pinus sylvestris, and Picea abies stands) and examined how forest type, aboveground burn severity, soil burn severity, and soil properties structured prokaryotic and fungal communities. Prokaryotic richness remained largely stable across burn severities, although the diversity of prokaryotes and gene copy numbers declined with soil burn severity. In contrast, fungal communities showed stronger responses. Fungal richness and diversity decreased with soil burn severity, while fungal gene copy numbers increased in stands of low aboveground severity. Microbial community composition shifted in response to fire, with pronounced turnover in fungal communities. Variation partitioning indicated that the composition was jointly influenced by forest type and aboveground burn severity, whereas soil properties explained little additional variation. Prokaryotic and fungal beta diversity did not correlate with plant beta diversity. Co-occurrence network analysis revealed fire-associated modules enriched in interkingdom links and a higher prevalence of positive associations in burned soils. Fire-associated taxa, including Actinomycetota and Ascomycota, dominated early post-fire communities. Our results demonstrate that early belowground recovery after wildfire in temperate Central European forests is shaped by strong environmental filtering imposed by burn severity and by legacy effects of forest type.
Coastal wetlands are situated at the intersection of land, water, and atmosphere, and play a vital role in biogeochemical and hydrological processes. The marshes of the Southeast Saline Everglades (SESE) are undergoing a state change where tropical halophytic woody vegetation continues to move inland, replacing freshwater marshes. This state change leads to uncertainty in the ecosystem energy balance. Understanding the energy dynamics of transitional ecosystems is limited, particularly in regions where mangroves are expanding. This study sought to address this knowledge gap using ecosystem-scale fluxes of energy measured by eddy covariance in the SESE with the following objectives: (1) evaluate seasonal energy budget and closure, (2) quantify seasonal fluxes of sensible heat, latent energy, and evapotranspiration (ET), and (3) compare fluxes to other wetland sites. Energy balance closure was 90 and 89
Litterfall, a key ecosystem process linking vegetation dynamics, carbon flux, and nutrient cycling, can be substantially altered by disease. However, effects of disease on both its production and spatial distribution are not well understood. We examined the effects of a dieback disease on leaf litterfall in forests dominated by a susceptible foundation tree species Agathis australis (kauri). Using leaf litterfall data and mapped trees from stands of varying successional stages and disease severity, we parameterised a spatially explicit Bayesian inverse model to estimate species-specific leaf litter production and dispersal for eight focal species as functions of tree size, distance from trunk, and disease severity. Kauri tree-level litterfall initially increased with disease severity but declined sharply after severe canopy loss. Due to the dominance of kauri, stand-level litterfall production mirrored effects of the disease at kauri tree-level litterfall, across all successional stages. On average, healthy stands produced 129.2 g m−2 year−1 less than a stand undergoing branch dieback and 142.7 g m−2 year−1 more than a stand with severe canopy dieback. Kauri’s distinct litter-dispersal pattern drives heterogeneous litterfall distribution, and its stand-level litterfall dominance, arising from structural prominence rather than high tree-level productivity, further amplifies this pattern. As kauri dominance increases with succession and dieback induces additional leaf shedding, stand-level heterogeneity and spatial variation in nutrient inputs intensify. These findings highlight the potential for kauri dieback to reshape litter inputs in ways that alter nutrient cycling and future succession, underscoring the need for management strategies that address ecological impacts beyond mortality.
Community perceptions of ecosystem services are shaped by individuals’ local contexts and their direct interactions with the environment. Examining these relationships enables a better understanding of how human perceptions of ecosystem services are associated with anthropogenic environmental change. In this study, we assessed the relationship between ecosystem service perceptions in riverside communities of semiarid reservoirs and sociodemographic variables, as well as the extent to which different land uses and land covers influence these perceptions. Interviews were conducted with residents living along the margins of the Sumé, Poções, and Cordeiro reservoirs (Paraíba River Basin) and the Sabugí, Passagem das Traíras, and Cruzeta reservoirs (Piranhas-Açu River Basin) in Northeast Brazil. Overall, 84
Coastal wetland persistence is controlled by coupled interactions among vegetation, geomorphology, and hydrodynamics that regulate elevation gain and spatial extent under sea level rise (SLR). While vertical processes such as sediment accretion have been widely studied, less is known about controls on lateral dynamics, including edge erosion and upslope migration, which together determine long-term marsh persistence. We quantified salt marsh lateral erosion and migration over 80+ years across 75 km of Long Island’s south shore and evaluated eight potential environmental drivers: tidal range, marsh width, elevation, slope, topographic position index, salinity, soil type, and fecal coliform concentration, a proxy for wastewater input. We found that marshes were migrating landward at rates of 0.44 ± 0.014 m yr−1 and eroding at rates of 0.20 ± 0.007 m yr−1. Rates of marsh migration and erosion were strong functions of environmental conditions (out-of-bag R2= 0.71 for migration; 0.72 for erosion), with particularly strong relationships observed for marsh width and elevation. Wider marshes and those at higher elevations showed slower migration rates, suggesting that these landscape configurations buffer coastlines not only from storm surges, but also from the forest dieback that facilitates wetland expansion. Higher-elevation marshes experienced lower erosion rates, consistent with the role of elevation capital in enhancing stability. Slope was not a significant predictor of migration despite its intuitive importance and prominence in numerical models.
