Assessing the impact of fire on spiders through a global comparative analysis

Abstract

In many regions fire regimes are changing due to anthropogenic factors. Understanding the responses of species to fire can help to develop predictive models and inform fire management decisions. Spiders are a diverse and ubiquitous group and can offer important insights into the impacts of fire on invertebrates and whether these depend on environmental factors, phylogenetic history or functional traits. We conducted phylogenetic comparative analyses of data from studies investigating the impacts of fire on spiders. We investigated whether fire affects spider abundance or presence and whether ecologically relevant traits or site-specific factors influence species’ responses to fire. Although difficult to make broad generalizations about the impacts of fire due to variation in site- and fire-specific factors, we find evidence that short fire intervals may be a threat to some spiders, and that fire affects abundance and species compositions in forests relative to other vegetation types. Orb and sheet web weavers were also more likely to be absent after fire than ambush hunters, ground hunters and other hunters suggesting functional traits may affect responses. Finally, we show that analyses of published data can be used to detect broad-scale patterns and provide an alternative to traditional meta-analytical approaches.

Fires and Clear-Cuttings as Local Areas of Arthropod Diversity in Polar Regions: Khibiny Mountains

“…Gnaphosidae species prefer open and warm habitats and have also been found in large numbers in dry and open habitats on the islands of the south-western Finnish archipelago [65]. A decrease in the number of spider species and an increase in the number of hunting species after a fire have also been described in a mountain mixed deciduous-coniferous forest in China [66] and, obviously, is a general pattern for ground-dwelling spider assemblages in disturbed territories [67].…”