News Brief | High severity blazes influence bee species

||| FROM THE WILDLIFE NEWS |||

To the degree that wildfires are seen as somehow non-destructive, it is usually couched in phrases like the fire was low intensity and most trees “survived” the blaze, as if tree survival is the important criterion for judging wildfires. We hear constantly about “good fires” (low tree mortality) and “bad fires” (higher tree mortality).

How livestock grazing (heavy cows crunching and compacting soil) and forest management practices like “salvage logging” of dead, fire-killed trees impact native bees has received little study.

One study in southern Oregon found “fire severity served as a strong driver of bee diversity: 20 times more individuals and 11 times more species were captured in areas that experienced high fire severity relative to areas with the lowest fire severity.”

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