A Look Into the Past: What Historic Field Data Tells Us About Understory Succession Post-Fire

As wildfires grow in frequency and intensity, long-term records documenting responses to altered fire regimes are essential for understanding and predicting changes in vegetation communities in burned landscapes. Peter Stickney was a renowned ecologist, dedicating his life to studying understory species succession following wildfire. In partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the MONTU Herbarium, we organized and analyzed Peter Stickney’s 50-year dataset to gain insight into how plant communities respond to disturbance. We added information on various functional characteristics for each species, including growth form (shrub, grass, or forb), native status (invasive vs. native), and conservatism value (c-value, a 1-10 value that describes how able a species is to tolerate disturbance). After analyzing these relationships, we found that native species outcompete exotics, forbs and grasses stabilize together, and disturbance intolerant species become more represented as time since fire increases. Moving forward, we would like to continue analysis for all of Stickney's observed fires and tie these analyses to environmental conditions (precipitation, temperature, drought index). This dataset will provide a historic reference for future studies about wildfire and prescribed burn effects on plant communities.