INVESTIGADORES
GHERMANDI Luciana
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Dendroecological potential of Fabiana imbricata shrub for reconstructing fire history at landscape scale in grasslands
Autor/es:
FACUNDO ODDI, LUCIANA GHERMANDI, AND ROSA LASAPONARA
Reunión:
Congreso; EGU General Assembly 2014; 2014
Resumen:
Fire recurrently affects many of the terrestrial ecosystems causing major implications on the structure and dynamics
of vegetation. In fire prone, it is particularly important to know the fire regime for which precise fire records are
needed. Dendroecology offers the possibility of obtaining fire occurrence data from woody species and has been
widely used in forest ecosystems for fire research. Grasslands are regions with no trees but shrubs could be used
to acquire dendroecological information in order to reconstructing fire history at landscape scale. We studied
the dendroecological potential of shrub F. imbricata to reconstruct fire history at landscape scale in a fire prone
grassland of northwestern Patagonia. To do this, we combined spatio-temporal information of recorded fires within
the study area with the age structure of F. imbricata shrublands derived by dendroecology. Sampling sites were
located over 2500 ha in San Ramón ranch, 30 km east from Bariloche, Río Negro province, Argentina (latitude
-41 04?; longitude -70 51?). Shrubland age structure correctly described how fires occurred in the past. Pulses of
individuals? recruitment were associated with fire in time and space. A bi-variate analysis showed that F. imbricata
recruits individuals during the two years after fire and spatial distribution of pulses coincided with the fire map.
In sites without fire data, the age structure allowed the identification of two additional fires. Our results show that
shrub F. imbricata can be employed with other data sources such as remote sensing and operational databases to
improve knowledge on fire regime in northwestern Patagonia grasslands. In conclusion, we raise the possibility of
utilizing shrubs as a dendroecological data source to study fire history in grasslands where tree cover is absent