BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Soil Sci.
Sec. Soil Biology, Ecosystems and Biodiversity
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoil.2025.1619114
Soil nematode community responses to prescribed burning in upland moorland: temporal dynamics prevail over fire effects
Provisionally accepted
- 1The James Hutton Institute, Dundee, United Kingdom
- 2NatureScot, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
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Muirburn is a land management practice of upland Calluna vulgaris-dominated moorland landscapes that uses prescribed burning to maintain vegetation diversity, enhance the nutritional value of vegetation for livestock and support game management. While the impacts of Muirburn are well characterised for aboveground diversity there is a lack of equivalent data on the impacts of Muirburn on soil biodiversity. To address this, the impact of Muirburn on soil nematode communities was assessed over a 12-month period. Muirburn had no effect on soil nematode abundance, community structure, species richness or functional group composition. However, irrespective of fire, there were temporal effects on nematode community structure likely driven by five genera representing several nematode functional groups, Bitylenchus, Filenchus, Plectus, Mesorhabditis and Thonus. Nematode species richness also exhibited a temporal effect although arguably this could have been driven by the final sampling timepoint. The relative composition of nematode functional groups also varied temporally. Results from this study contribute to addressing the significant knowledge deficit regarding the impacts of Muirburn practices on soil biodiversity and helps to inform future best practice guidance for the prescribed burning of upland moorland.
Keywords: Biodiversity, communities, disturbance, Fire ecology, land management, soil biota, soil ecology, Upland conservation
Received: 27 Apr 2025; Accepted: 05 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Neilson, King, Hooper, Fielding and Giles. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roy Neilson, The James Hutton Institute, Dundee, United Kingdom
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