Food webs for three burn severities after wildfire in the Eldorado National Forest, California

John P McLaughlin; John W Schroeder; Angela M White; Kate Culhane; Haley E Mirts; Gina L Tarbill; Laura Sire; Matt Page; Elijah J Baker; Max Moritz; Justin Brashares; Hillary S Young; Rahel Sollmann

doi:10.1038/s41597-022-01220-w

Food webs for three burn severities after wildfire in the Eldorado National Forest, California

Sci Data. 2022 Jul 7;9(1):384. doi: 10.1038/s41597-022-01220-w.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-6150, USA. johnmclaughlin@ucsb.edu.
² Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-6150, USA.
³ USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Davis, CA, 95618, USA.
⁴ Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
⁵ Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-4160, USA.
⁶ University of California Cooperative Extension, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-5131, USA.
⁷ Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California Berkeley, 130 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁸ Department of Ecological Dynamics, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Alfred-Kowalke-Str. 17, 12459, Berlin, Germany.

Abstract

Wildfire dynamics are changing around the world and understanding their effects on ecological communities and landscapes is urgent and important. We report detailed food webs for unburned, low-to-moderate and high severity burned habitats three years post-fire in the Eldorado National Forest, California. The cumulative cross-habitat food web contains 3,084 ontogenetic stages (nodes) or plant parts comprising 849 species (including 107 primary producers, 634 invertebrates, 94 vertebrates). There were 178,655 trophic interactions between these nodes. We provide information on taxonomy, body size, biomass density and trophic interactions under each of the three burn conditions. We detail 19 sampling methods deployed across 27 sites (nine in each burn condition) used to estimate the richness, body size, abundance and biomass density estimates in the node lists. We provide the R code and raw data to estimate summarized node densities and assign trophic links.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't