Wetlands and wildfires (English, HTML)

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Publisher-reported update

2025-01-17

Freshwater wetlands are a key feature of the boreal landscape, where the predominant natural disturbance is wildfire. The size and frequency of wildfires, however, are increasing, especially in North America’s boreal areas. To make informed predictions about the effects of such landscape-level changes on freshwater ecosystems and the wildlife that depend on them, understanding bottom-up effects of wildfire, particularly in nutrient-limited boreal wetlands, is a key research need. To address questions related to impacts of fire on wetland trophic structure, we measured total nitrogen, total phosphorous, and chlorophyll-a concentrations, true water colour, macroinvertebrate community characteristics, and indicated breeding scaup (Aythya spp.) pairs in burned and unburned wetlands one to two years following wildfire in a boreal wetland complex in northwestern Canada. Under the trophic enrichment hypothesis, we expected that wetlands in areas recently burned by wildfires would have higher nutrient and productivity levels, darker coloured water, unique macroinvertebrate communities, and a greater abundance of breeding duck pairs than wetlands in unburned areas. Consistent with our…

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