Responses of Arthropods to Fire and How Pollinators and Pollination Services Are Affected by Fire Severity

Fires impact ecosystems globally and due to climate change, there are shifts in fire regimes that impact ecological communities which provide essential ecosystem services. Focusing on arthropods, fire can influence this ubiquitous animal group in various way. We performed a comprehensive meta-analysis evaluating how fires impact differing arthropod functional groups. We found that overall, fire negatively effects community level responses for most functional groups with herbivores as the only exception showing some positive effects of fire. We also studied mixed-severity fires that burned \u3e20 years ago and compared floral visitor communities across fire severities. We implemented a pollinator exclusion experiment to determine how floral visitors impacted fruit set of wax currants (Ribes cereum). We found that there was no difference in floral visitor communities or fruit set of wax currants across fire severity but that the pollinator exclusion treatment did have a significant impact on fruit set, especially early-season pollinators