Fire as a Filter of Insect Assemblages in Algerian Cork Oak Forests: Two-Year Changes in Similarity, Composition and Diversity Across Four Suberaies
- Publicada
- Servidor
- Preprints.org
- DOI
- 10.20944/preprints202608.0538.v1
Wildfire is a dominant disturbance in Mediterranean cork oak (Quercus suber) ecosystems, yet its medium-term consequences for insect assemblages remain poorly documented in North Africa. We compared burnt and unburnt stands in four suberaies of north-eastern Algeria (Djebel El Goufi/Lemdjalba, El Maktoua, Oued Agouf and Ain Fegoune) during two consecutive post-fire years (2015 and 2016). Across 16 station-year units, 402 insect species were recorded. Unburnt stands harboured 364 species against 111 in burnt stands, and 291 species were exclusive to unburnt stands. Sorensen similarity between burnt and unburnt stands was consistently low (mean 18.4% in 2015 and 10.8% in 2016), whereas unburnt stands remained comparatively stable between years (mean 61.9%) and burnt stands did not (22.5%). Principal component analysis of Hellinger-transformed abundances separated burnt from unburnt units along PC1, and PERMANOVA confirmed a significant effect of fire history (R2 = 0.25, p = 0.0001; ANOSIM R = 0.72, p < 0.001) with no significant year or interaction effect. UpSet and chord diagrams showed that species overlap was concentrated within, rather than between, fire-history classes, with only one to two species shared by all eight stations. Two years after fire, assemblages had not begun to converge towards the unburnt reference, indicating slow entomofaunal resilience and supporting the retention of unburnt refuges in post-fire management.