Ground-dwelling arthropod response to fire and clearcutting in jack pine: implications for ecosystem management

We tested the response of species composition of three dominant litter-dwelling arthropod taxa (carabid beetles, spiders, and rove beetles) to wildfire and harvest. This study was conducted in northcentral Ontario (47° 42’ N, 83° 36’ W) in jack pine dominated stands in 2013 using pitfall trapping. Using 222 species (12, 015 individuals), we compared effects of disturbance using recently burned (3 years post-fire) and clearcut sites (3-years post-harvest; tree-length, full-tree, stump removal and blading) as well as older, closed-canopy stands that have regenerated following clearcutting (51 years post-harvest) and fire (92 years post-fire), with multivariate regression trees. Taxa were more similar in the three controls (including recent fire) than to harvested treatments with increased forest floor disturbance in harvested plots being a likely explanation. In addition, taxa were different in the younger (51 years) harvest origin plots than the older (92 years) fire origin plots suggesting that communities had not yet recovered from the harvest disturbance possibly due to insufficient coarse woody debris in the younger stand. These results indicate that forest management practices that match natural forest floor disturbance could ameliorate short-term effects whereas the maintenance of more coarse woody debris could reduce the recovery time of epigaeic communities.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author