Data for: Positive impact of postfire environment on bumble bees not explained by habitat variables in a remote forested ecosystem ...

• Main Author: Jackson, Hanna M.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2023
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; occupancy model; Bombus; canopy openness; floral resource; field survey; Bumble bee; detection probability; insect pollinator; plant-animal interaction; Plant-Insect Interaction; plant-pollinator interactions; disturbance; wildfire; insect abundance; insect; hierarchical model; R; Forest community; transect; Gap light analyser; British Columbia; Canada; Ulkatcho; First Nations
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wdbrv15sr; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.wdbrv15sr

Bumble bees are important pollinators in temperate forested regions where fire is a driving force for habitat change, and thus understanding how these insects respond to fire is critical. Previous work has shown bees are often positively affected by the post-fire environment, with burned sites supporting greater bee abundance and diversity, and increased floral resources. The extent to which fire impacts variation in bumble bee site occupancy is not well understood, especially in higher latitude regions with dense, primarily coniferous forests. Occupancy models are powerful tools for biodiversity analyses, as they separately estimate occupancy probability (likelihood that a species is present at a particular location) and detection probability (likelihood of observing a species when it is present). Using these models, we tested whether bumble bee site occupancy is higher in burned locations as a result of the increase in canopy openness, floral species richness, and floral abundance. We quantified the impact ... : Our study was conducted on the unceded territories of the Nuxalk and Ulkatcho First Nations, in and around Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada, from June to August 2019 (Fig. 1). We established sites both in and adjacent to four wildfire zones, two of which are recent burns (2017 and 2018) and two of which are older burns (2009 and 2010), though the older burns had not significantly regenerated, as high burn severity and high elevation have limited tree and shrub regrowth. Three of the burns were large in scale (2,800 to over 7,000 hectares), and the most recent burn was smaller (40 hectares). The unburned sites were in forest habitat adjacent to each of these burned areas. We sampled a total of 26 circular sites of 100m diameter, 13 in areas impacted by fire (4 in each large fire and 1 in the smaller fire) which we call "burned" sites, and 13 in nearby unaffected forest, which we call "unburned" sites. We selected sites such that edges were a minimum of 1 km from all other site edges to ...