Impacts of repeated wildfire on long-unburned plant communities of the southern Appalachian Mountains

To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article is copyrighted by the International Association of Wildland Fire and published by CSIRO Publishing. It can be found at: http://www.publish.csiro.au/?paper=WF14143Table S1 in the Supplementary Material, available online only.The infrequent occurrence of large wildfires in the southern Appalachian Mountains over the last several decades has offered few opportunities to study their impacts. From 2000 to 2008, five wildfires burned a large portion of the area in and surrounding the Linville Gorge Wilderness in North Carolina. Areas were burned either once or twice. The response of acid cove and thermic oak plant communities (structure, cover, richness, diversity) was measured in 78 vegetation monitoring plots, established in 1992 and remeasured in 2010–11. Fire altered forest structure in both communities, resulting in the mortality of larger trees and increases in the abundance of smaller (