7 December, 2019 (Bar, NPH, Fire)
Bรคr, A., Michaletz, S.T. and Mayr, S. (2019), Fire effects on tree physiology. New Phytologist, 223: 1728-1741. doi:10.1111/nph.15871
My research group at NIFOS was invited to write a research paper for a special issue of a journal. We decided to write a paper about the lagged browning after the forest fire at April 2019. I wrote about how forest fire affects an individual tree’s physiology, referring majorly to this paper.
This paper, as other Tansley reviews often do, includes excellent visual summaries like Figure 3 which compiles the physiological responses of plant organs to fire injuries. In short, dreadful heat and drastic drying are the major causes of burning up NSCs, malfunctioning of the hydraulic system, and increasing susceptibility to insect attacks.
After reading this, I felt that the mechanism behind the fire-caused tree dieback is the same as the one behind general tree dieback. Fire is just one of the triggers.
