Effects of low wildfire burn severity due to pre-fire shrub thinning on the chaparral soil bacteriome in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California.

Our objective was to study the longitudinal effect of decreased burn severity due to vegetation-type conversion (VTC) induced by chaparral shrub thinning prior to the Woolsey wildfire (November 2018) on soil chemistry and bacteriome composition and function. We compared soils from two study sites on the Malibu campus of Pepperdine University in the Santa Monica Mountains: one site had dense, unaltered chaparral shrubland and experienced a 4.5-fold increase in vegetation burn severity (high severity burn) compared to an adjacent altered site where the vegetative fuel load was 80% less prior to the fire (low severity burn).

Temperature alters the toxicological impacts of plant terpenoids on the polyphagous model herbivore Vanessa cardui.

Terpenes are a major class of secondary metabolites present in all plants, and long hypothesized to have diversified in response to specific plant-herbivore interactions. Herbivory is a major biotic interaction that plays out across broad temporal and spatial scales that vary dramatically in temperature regimes, both due to climatic variation across geographic locations as well as the effect of seasonality. In addition, there is an emerging understanding that global climate change will continue to alter the temperature regimes of nearly every habitat on Earth over the coming centuries.