Abstract
Human disruption of climate, habitat, and ignition has altered the behavior of wildland fire at local to continental scales. In many regions, novel fire regimes are emerging that threaten to exceed the capacity for local management to protect human wellbeing and ecosystem function. Simultaneous changes in climate, species composition, and fire management have resulted in extreme fire behavior in many regions. For the Western United States, the emerging novel fire regime consists of more frequent, severe, and intense wildfires, with annual area burned by wildfire having doubled and high-severity wildfire area having increased 8-fold since the 1980s. The impacts of these increasing stresses in the Great Basin is especially pressing when combined with the many years of historically poor resource management. Here we complete a literature review of changing wildfire regimes globally (chapter 1) and a study of how the abiotic and biotic aspects of aquatic ecosystems stabilize after a megafire in the western United States (chapter 2).
Degree
MS
College and Department
Life Sciences; Plant and Wildlife Sciences
Rights
https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Errigo, Isabella M., "Of Bugs and Wildfires: Tracing the Impacts of Changing Wildfire Regimes on Aquatic Bacteria and Macroinvertebrates Using eDNA" (2022). Theses and Dissertations. 10248.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/10248
Date Submitted
2022-12-15
Document Type
Thesis
Handle
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd13086
Keywords
novel fire regimes, wildland-urban interface, Anthropocene, global, state change, ecosystem consequences, human health, eDNA, metabarcoding, microbes, macroinvertebrates
Language
english