Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Organizational Unit

Biological Sciences

First Advisor

Shannon M. Murphy

Second Advisor

Adrian Carper

Third Advisor

Julie Morris

Fourth Advisor

Erica Larson

Keywords

Fire, Climate change, Pollinators, Ecology

Abstract

Fires impact ecosystems globally and due to climate change, there are shifts in fire regimes that impact ecological communities which provide essential ecosystem services. Focusing on arthropods, fire can influence this ubiquitous animal group in various way. We performed a comprehensive meta-analysis evaluating how fires impact differing arthropod functional groups. We found that overall, fire negatively effects community level responses for most functional groups with herbivores as the only exception showing some positive effects of fire. We also studied mixed-severity fires that burned >20 years ago and compared floral visitor communities across fire severities. We implemented a pollinator exclusion experiment to determine how floral visitors impacted fruit set of wax currants (Ribes cereum). We found that there was no difference in floral visitor communities or fruit set of wax currants across fire severity but that the pollinator exclusion treatment did have a significant impact on fruit set, especially early-season pollinators.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Blyssalyn V. Bieber

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

67 pgs

Discipline

Ecology

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