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| Titel |
Post-wildfire natural restoration of riparian vegetation under stable hydro-geomorphic conditions: Nahal Grar, Northern Negev Desert, Israel |
| VerfasserIn |
Roey Egozi |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2015
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 17 (2015) |
| Datensatznummer |
250106635
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2015-6313.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Wildfires are common to the Mediterranean region due to its defined dry season and long
historical anthropogenic activities. Most of post-wildfire studies focus on mountains areas
and thus refer to the hill-slope and its physical characteristics, e.g. morphology, length,
angles, and aspect; its soil characteristics, e.g. type, infiltration rate, repellency;
and its vegetative covers, e.g. planted trees vs. natural forest or native vs. exotic
vegetation. In contrary there is very limited literature focusing on ecological and
hydro-geomorphic aspects of post-wildfire of riparian vegetation / zone probably
because of its negligible burned area relative to the spread of the fire, sometimes,
over the whole watershed area. The limited literature on the topic is surprising
given the fact that riparian vegetation zone has been acknowledged as a unique and
important habitat supporting rich biodiversity. Herein we report on a wildfire event
occurred on October 14th 2009 in a river section of Nahal Grar, Northern Negev
Desert, Israel. The wildfire although was limited in its area (only 3 hectare) extended
over the channel alone from bank to bank and thus provide a unique case study of
completely burn down of riparian vegetation, mainly dense stands of Common
Red (Australis Phragmites. Therefore a detailed study of this event provides an
opportunity to tackle one of the basics questions which is determining the rate of
natural restoration process that act at the immediate time after the wildfire event
occurred. This type of information is most valuable to professional and stakeholders for
better management of post-fire riparian zones. The results of the study suggest
that under stable conditions, i.e. no major flood events occurred; disturbance time
was short and ranged over Â200 days due to, almost, immediate recovery of the
riparian vegetation. However the re-growth of the riparian vegetation was not even but
rather deferential and more complex then reported in the literature. In addition
during that period no morphological changes were measured in the channel bed and
banks; similarly no changes observed to base flow discharge though slight changes
were measured to water pH probably due to the large quantities of ash on river
bed. |
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