Postfire biodiversity database for eastern Iberia

Abstract

In the summer of 2012, two fires affected Mediterranean ecosystems in the eastern Iberian Peninsula. The size of these fires was at the extreme of the historical variability (megafires). Animals are traditionally assumed to recolonize from source populations outside of the burned area (exogenous regeneration) while plants recover from endogenous regeneration (resprouting and seeding). However, there is increasing evidence of in situ fire survival in animals. To evaluate the effect of large-scale fires on biodiversity and the mechanism of recovery, in 2013, we set up 12 plots per fire, covering burned vegetation at different distances from the fire perimeter and unburned vegetation. In each plot, we followed the postfire recovery of arthropods, reptiles (including some of their parasites), and plants for 2 to 5 years. Here we present the resulting database (POSTDIV) of taxon abundance. POSTDIV totals 19,906 records for 457 arthropod taxa (113,681 individuals), 12 reptile taxa (503 individuals), 4 reptile parasites (234 individuals), and 518 plant taxa (cover-abundance). We provide examples in the R language to query the database.

Fig. 1

Location of the two study areas affected by the 2012 megafires in Andilla and Cortes (Valencia, Spain, eastern Iberian Peninsula). (A) Burned area (in orange) in Andilla (north) and Cortes (south). (B) Andilla burned area (~21,000 ha). (C) Cortes burned area (~30,000 ha; Table 1). In B and C, symbols represent sampling plots (circles = unburned; triangles = burned edge; red squares = burned middle and center), and unburned patches in white are villages and agricultural fields without natural vegetation. Modified from Pausas et al..

Fig. 2

Climate variation recorded at the Llíria meteorological station (250 m asl, 39°39′50″N/0°39′14″W; owned by IVIA, http://riegos.ivia.es) located between the 2012 Andilla and Cortes fires (Valencia, Spain, eastern Iberian Peninsula). Boxplots show monthly variability in precipitation from 2000 to 2012 (left axis). Symbols represent monthly precipitation in 2013 (black circles) and 2014 (white triangles). Blue line shows mean monthly temperature (°C, right axis) from 2000 to 2012 (mean daily temperature averaged by month and year). Interannual variability in temperature (not shown) was much lower than in precipitation. Source: Pausas et al..

Fig. 3

The POSTDIV database is composed of six data tables (blue boxes). Descriptors (fields) represent columns in the data tables (see Tables 2, 5 for a complete list of descriptors). Connector lines link data tables with taxon abundance (arthropods, reptiles, parasites, plants; left boxes) to data tables with taxonomic assignments and plot descriptors (right boxes). Asterisks denote unique identifiers in each data table. Numbers in the lower-left corners of the boxes represent number of rows and number of columns per data table.

Fig. 4

Number of records in the POSTDIV database (see Tables 3, 4) by Kingdom (colours) and Order (ordinate axis, only orders with >20 records).

Fig. 5

Number of species (arthropods, reptiles, plants) in the POSTDIV database by Kingdom (colours) and Order (ordinate axis, only orders with >5 species).