Current Projects
Impacts of Prescribed Fire on Soils, Plants, & Wildfire RiskSoil heating resulting from prescribed burning in the southern region of the US (the “South”) has potential immediate and long-term impacts. Where fire is being restored to long-unburned sites, the duration and depth of soil heating may be substantial, affecting seed banks, soil carbon cycling, and root and rhizosphere systems. However, the rule of thumb that fire for 1 minute at 60 degrees C causes mortality across lifeforms is something we questioned and revealed to have little support when it comes to fungal and bacterial soil microbes.
Where fire has been used frequently, effects on soil qualities are assumed benign, but this is not empirically proven. Current understanding of the relationships between fuels, prescribed burning, and soil heating is limited in southern pine ecosystems, even though the region burns a higher percentage of its forests than anywhere else in the US. To fill this knowledge gap, we characterized the relationships among fuels, fire, and soil heating in two widespread forest types of the South: pine flatwoods and pine sandhills. Second, to quantify second-order effects with clear management implications for ecosystem sustainability, we evaluated soil heating impacts on tree stress, seed banks, and soil respiration. Below-ground soil processes are integrated in soil respiration, which indicates the combined biological and physical consequences of soil heating, and is a critical component of ecosystem carbon budgets. Overstory tree retention and diverse understory vegetation are principal goals for restoration of these ecosystems, and are likely to be influenced by soil heating. Read the paper here. |
Fire Management & Policy
Lead (awesome!) author of our collaborative paper, Dr. Susan Prichard, was invited to discourse with POTUS about the work:
Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: 10 common questions Contrary to popular belief, here we highlight the important role of fire in managing and conserving threatened or endangered bird species: Is fire for the birds? How two rare species influence fire management across the US. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 17(7): 391-399. Fire management decision making is often influence by an attempt to recreate historical conditions- but is this the right thing to do? See Leda's talk from May of 2017: An Examination of the Historical Fire Regime Concept And a critique of the historical-fire-regime concept in conservation. Check out the paper published in Conservation Biology. |
PyroAeroBiology & Microbial Dispersal Through Smoke"BioSmoke-Connect"
Wildland fires (wildfires and prescribed fires) are understood in terms of terrestrial biophysical impacts and atmospheric physiochemical and climate interactions, but research has only begun to connect the widespread disturbance of wildland fire with bioaerosol emissions (see Publications). Biomass burning is both a natural process and a human-induced disturbance that has shaped the terrestrial biosphere since the early Devonian era. The role of smoke as a vector for the aerosolization and transport of living microbes challenges the concept of a wildland fire’s perimeter of biological impact (Kobziar et al. 2018, 2019a, 2022; Moore et al. 2020). Microbial emissions in smoke from biomass burning are not only far-reaching, but both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the bioaerosols observed from wind-driven emissions, implying that wildland fire may be a hitherto unknown mechanism for microbial teleconnections among ecosystems and infectious disease outbreaks. Our W. M. Keck Foundation Pyroaeromycoses project focuses on fungal pathogens in wildland fire smoke (led by Jason Smith, Univ. Florida) The Kobziar Lab is currently funded by the NSF, the W. M. Keck Foundation, EPA and the USDA Forest Service to pursue this line of research. Dr. Kobziar works with the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE) team to sample microbes using UAS and relate results to fire behavior and plume dynamics. |