Life Sciences Commons^™

Wild Bee Diversity Increases With Local Fire Severity In A Fire‐Prone Landscape, Sara M. Galbraith, James H. Cane, Andrew R. Moldenke, James W. Rivers

All PIRU Publications

As wildfire activity increases in many regions of the world, it is imperative that we understand how key components of fire‐prone ecosystems respond to spatial variation in fire characteristics. Pollinators provide a foundation for ecological communities by assisting in the reproduction of native plants, yet our understanding of how pollinators such as wild bees respond to variation in fire severity is limited, particularly for forest ecosystems. Here, we took advantage of a natural experiment created by a large‐scale, mixed‐severity wildfire to provide the first assessment of how wild bee communities are shaped by fire severity in mixed‐conifer forest. We sampled …