Cataloging Information
Wildlife
Fire Intensity / Burn Severity
Pollinators
Resilience
Wildfires can impact the availability of insect habitat, including nesting habitat. We studied the effects of wildfire burn severity on cavity-nesting bee and wasp abundance and diversity, and nesting habitat across burn severities (high, low, unburned) in two mixed-severity fires in ponderosa pine, Pinus ponderosa, forest that burned >20 years ago. We collected cavity-nesters with 36 trap-nests consisting of bundles of hollow reeds across 18 sites. We used a new key for nest caps to identify our specimens before rearing them out over the winter. We also measured habitat factors that could provide natural cavities for bees and wasps, such as coarse woody debris, standing dead wood, and shrub stems. We found no effects of fire severity on cavitynesting bee and wasp abundance or diversity. We also found that high severity sites had more coarse woody debris for potential nesting habitat than unburned sites, but we did not observe an effect of burn severity on other nesting habitat factors. Our results indicate that fire, even high severity fire, does not have lasting negative impacts on cavity-nesting bees and wasps.
Citation
wasp habitat and community composition two decades post fire. Joint Fire Sciences Final Report PROJECT ID: L23AC00284 March 2025; 30 p.