Life after fire - Long-term responses of 20 timber species in semi-deciduous forests of West Africa

Elogne Aka Guy-Michel, Piponiot Camille, Zo-Bi Irie Casimir, Amani Bienvenu Hippolyte K, Van der Meersch Victor, Herault Bruno. 2023. Life after fire - Long-term responses of 20 timber species in semi-deciduous forests of West Africa. Forest Ecology and Management, 538:120977, 10 p.

Résumé : Understanding the response of commercial timber species to fire is fundamental to designing sustainable forest management strategies in West Africa. In this area of high deforestation for agriculture, semi-deciduous tropical forests have been reduced to a trickle in 50 years and are now subject not only to logging but also to increasingly frequent fires. This paper aims to study the long-term (37 years) demographic and growth responses of 20 timber species after a spatially heterogeneous fire in a West African semi-deciduous forest. We (i) inventoried, in 2020, 100 hectares of plots already established before the 1983 fire, (ii) built demographic and growth models, in a Bayesian framework, to estimate the vulnerability to fire of each species and (iii) linked this vulnerability to functional traits: wood density (WD) and bark thickness (BT). Our results show that most species have lower current abundances but higher growths in burnt areas than in fire-preserved areas. We identified three categories of vulnerability to fire: 1 non-vulnerable species, 16 species with vulnerable demography, and 3 highly vulnerable species. Species with high wood density or thin bark show higher demographic vulnerability to fire. Our results show that fire management is a top priority in West African semi-deciduous forests to maintain long-term populations of timber species and ultimately the forest industry. The differences in vulnerability observed, and the strong predictive power of the functional traits studied, should make it possible to (i) better define harvesting rates and adapt them to fire risk and (ii) better select commercial species to be promoted for reforestation or natural (assisted) regeneration.

Mots-clés Agrovoc : forêt tropicale, déboisement, aménagement forestier, incendie de forêt, régénération naturelle, reconstitution forestière, gestion des incendies de forêt, bois, incendie, démographie, croissance, exploitation forestière, forêt tropicale humide, espèce

Mots-clés géographiques Agrovoc : Afrique occidentale

Mots-clés libres : West Africa, Fire, Timberwood, Wood density, Bark thicknes, Semi-deciduous fores, Vulnerability, Bayesian modeling

Classification Agris : K70 - Dégâts causés aux forêts et leur protection
P01 - Conservation de la nature et ressources foncières
F40 - Écologie végétale

Champ stratégique Cirad : CTS 4 (2019-) - Santé des plantes, des animaux et des écosystèmes

Agences de financement hors UE : Education and Research Ministry of Côte d'Ivoire

Projets sur financement : (CIV) Réhabilitation du dispositif de la Téné en vue de la valorisation de la biodiversité et des services écosystémiques des forêts semi-décidues de Côte d’Ivoire

Auteurs et affiliations

• Elogne Aka Guy-Michel, CIRAD-ES-UPR Forêts et sociétés (FRA)
• Piponiot Camille, CIRAD-ES-UPR Forêts et sociétés (FRA) ORCID: 0000-0002-3473-1982
• Zo-Bi Irie Casimir, INPHB (CIV)
• Amani Bienvenu Hippolyte K, CIRAD-ES-UPR Forêts et sociétés (CIV)
• Van der Meersch Victor, Université de Montpellier (FRA)
• Herault Bruno, CIRAD-ES-UPR Forêts et sociétés (FRA) ORCID: 0000-0002-6950-7286 - auteur correspondant

Source : Cirad-Agritrop (https://agritrop.cirad.fr/604421/)

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