The influence of sporadic and regular fires on invertebrate biodiversity in deciduous forests of the southern slope of the Alps

In Switzerland, the region most effected by this phenomenon is the southern slope of the Alps, where about 50% of the cases on a national level occur. Current knowledge on the consequences of wildfire for faunistic biodiversity is fragmentary.

Project aims

The main questions that this project seeks to answer are:

1. What short to long term effects does a single forest fire have on the faunistic biodiversity?
   
2. To what extent does this effect change with repeated fires?
   
3. Which faunistic taxa are most severely affected by forest fires?
   
4. Are there fire-adapted species which profit from or even depend on regular fires?

A part-project (diploma thesis) is investigating the following questions:

1. How do carabid beetles react to single and repeated fires in the chestnut forests of the insubric regions south of the Alps? Are there differences in the abundance and in the diversity of species?
   
2. Are there carabid species which depend on repeated fires for their reproduction and development? Are there fire-adapted species?

There are some few open sites in the forest zone which are compared with the closed ones.

Team

This project is supported by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) at Birmensdorf (Switzerland) and it represents a doctoral thesis by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (Switzerland). The project is part of a research program of the WSL Station South of the Alps at Bellinzona (Switzerland). On the project collaborate the Natural Hystoric Museum of Lugano (Switzerland) and many entomologists from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Republic of Czechoslovakia.

Contact

• Peter Duelli