Plant Diversity ›› 2023, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (04): 385-396.DOI: 10.1016/j.pld.2022.11.007

• Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Functional diversity in an Andean subpáramo affected by wildfire in Colombia

Korina Ocampo-Zuletaa,b,c, Ángela Parrado-Rossellid   

  1. a. Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Evolutivas. Facultad de Ciencias. Universidad Austral de Chile. Campus Isla Teja, 5090000 Valdivia, Chile;
    b. Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Mención Ecología y Evolución, Escuela de Graduados, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile;
    c. Jardín Botánico de Bogotá José Celestino Mutis, Subdirección Científica, Línea de Investigación en Restauración Ecológica, 111071, Bogotá, Colombia;
    d. Facultad del Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Sede Vivero, 111711, Bogotá, Colombia
  • Received:2022-03-20 Revised:2022-11-23 Online:2023-07-25 Published:2023-08-21
  • Contact: Korina Ocampo-Zuleta,E-mail:korinaocampozuleta@gmail.com
  • Supported by:
    Thanks to the Scientific Sub-direction of the Bogotá Botanical Garden in Colombia, which funded this research [Investment project No. 1121, 2016]. In addition to ANID PhD fellowship, Chile [No. 21190817, 2019] and Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Desarrollo y Creación Artística (VIDCA) grant from the Universidad Austral de Chile [No. TD-2021-01, 2021] awarded to KOZ. Thanks to Enoc Sánchez-Londoño and the operational team assigned to the study in APIRE Cerro Aguanoso. We appreciate the insightful and constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Abstract: Recently, the Andean subpáramo in Colombia has experienced severe wildfires, but little is known about the functional composition of recovering or not after a wildfire. Therefore, we examined the functional community composition subpáramo affected by fire in 2016. We documented how functional traits changed 31 months after the disturbance and compared them with an unburned site. We sampled from one to two years after the fire every four months, then registered all recruits in 16 5×5m plots. New individuals were classified into strategy functional groups based on the traits of persistence and dispersal. The first group was stem type and regeneration mechanism (seedling and resprout), and the second was fruit type and dispersal mode. We investigated the degree to which functional diversity changes plant communities over time (woody and non-woody), and we compared it with an unburned site. The most relevant results showed that resprouts and seed regenerated increased post-fire time and significant differences between sampling periods. The anemochory is the most relevant dispersal mode that indicates the community capacity to colonize the new gaps opened by the fire rapidly. We discuss how wildfire appears to be a triggering factor for persistence and dispersal strategy groups in subpáramo burned given their characteristics of tolerance to stress. For this reason, a greater functional divergence between the ecosystems studied post-fire recovery has been related to higher levels of biodiversity at the landscape scale due to the high degree of endemism and significant differences in species composition between páramos.

Key words: Subpáramo, Cerro aguanoso, Dispersal mode, Functional traits, Postfire regeneration