
Adam F. A. PellegriniUniversity of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Plant Sciences
Adam F. A. Pellegrini
Doctor of Philosophy
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64
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (64)
Fire frequency is changing globally and is projected to affect the global carbon cycle and climate. However, uncertainty about how ecosystems respond to decadal changes in fire frequency makes it difficult to predict the effects of altered fire regimes on the carbon cycle; for instance, we do not fully understand the long-term effects of fire on so...
Global change has resulted in chronic shifts in fire regimes. Variability in the sensitivity of tree communities to multi-decadal changes in fire regimes is critical to anticipating shifts in ecosystem structure and function, yet remains poorly understood. Here, we address the overall effects of fire on tree communities and the factors controlling...
One paradigm in biogeochemistry is that frequent disturbance tends to deplete carbon (C) in soil organic matter (SOM) by reducing biomass inputs and promoting losses. However, disturbance by fire has challenged this paradigm because soil C responses to frequent and/or intense fires are highly variable, despite observed declines in biomass inputs. H...
The determinants of fire-driven changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) across broad environmental gradients remains unclear, especially in global drylands. Here we combined datasets and field sampling of fire-manipulation experiments to evaluate where and why fire changes SOC and compared our statistical model to simulations from ecosystem models. Dr...
Wildfire activity and the hydrological cycle are strongly interlinked. While it is well known that wildfire occurrence and intensity are controlled by water availability, less is known about the effects of wildfire on plant and soil water cycling, especially at large scales. Here we investigate this by analysing fire impacts on the coupling between...
Soil organic matter decomposition and its interactions with climate depend on whether the organic matter is associated with soil minerals. However, data limitations have hindered global-scale analyses of mineral-associated and particulate soil organic carbon pools and their benchmarking in Earth system models used to estimate carbon cycle–climate f...
Woody plant encroachment (WPE) is a global trend that occurs in many biomes, including savannas, and accelerates with fire suppression. Since WPE can result in increased storage of soil organic carbon (SOC), fire management, which may include fire suppression, can improve ecosystem carbon (C) sequestration in savannas.
At our study site in Kruger N...
Fire is an integral part of the Earth System and humans have skillfully used fire for millennia. Yet human activities are scaling up and reinforcing each other in ways that are reshaping fire patterns across the planet. We review these changes using the concept of the fire regime, which describes the timing, location, and type of fires. We then exp...
Fire is an important process in savanna as well as forest ecosystems, but its effects on herbaceous vegetation across biomes remain unelucidated. In theory, fire- vegetation feedbacks maintain the vegetation structure of both savannas and forests. In savannas, a continuous layer of highly flammable herbaceous vegetation promotes frequent fires, whi...
Fire-vegetation feedbacks potentially maintain global savanna and forest distributions. Accordingly, vegetation in savanna and forest biomes should have differential responses to fire, but fire response data for herbaceous vegetation has yet to be synthesized across sites. Here, we examined herbaceous vegetation responses to experimental fire at 30...
The functional response of plant communities to disturbance is hypothesised to be controlled by changes in environmental conditions and evolutionary history of species within the community. However, separating these influences using direct manipulations of repeated disturbances within ecosystems is rare. We evaluated how 41 years of manipulated fir...
Widespread changes in the intensity and frequency of fires across the globe are altering the terrestrial carbon (C) sink 1–4 . Although the changes in ecosystem C have been reasonably well quantified for plant biomass pools 5–7 , an understanding of the determinants of fire-driven changes in soil organic C (SOC) across broad environmental gradients...
Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical chan...
Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical chan...
There is little robust, quantitative information on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the extinction crisis. Focusing on Madagascar, one of the world’s most threatened biodiversity hotspots, we explore whether the cessation of on-site protected-area management activities due to the pandemic were associated with increased burning inside protec...
Soil is the largest terrestrial reservoir of organic carbon and is central for climate change mitigation and carbon-climate feedbacks. Chemical and physical associations of soil carbon with minerals play a critical role in carbon storage, but the amount and global capacity for storage in this form remain unquantified. Here, we produce spatially-res...
Fire is a very common disturbance in terrestrial ecosystems and can give rise to significant effects on soil carbon (C) cycling and storage. Here, we conducted a global meta-analysis on the response of soil C cycling and storage across soil profiles (organic layer, 0-5 cm, 0-10 cm, 0-20 cm, and 20-100 cm) to fire reported in 308 studies across 383...
Recent extreme wildfire seasons in several regions have been associated with exceptionally hot, dry conditions, made more probable by climate change. Much research has focused on extreme fire weather and its drivers, but natural wildfire regimes – and their interactions with human activities – are far from being comprehensively understood. There is...
Humid tropical forests play a dominant role in the functioning of Earth but are under increasing threat from changes in land use and climate. How forest vulnerability varies across space and time and what level of stress forests can tolerate before facing a tipping point are poorly understood. Here, we develop a tropical forest vulnerability index...
The impact of shifting disturbance regimes on soil carbon (C) storage is a key uncertainty in global change research. Wildfires in coniferous forests are becoming more frequent in many regions, potentially causing large C emissions. Repeated low‐intensity fires can mitigate wildfire severity, but repeated combustion may decrease soil C unless compe...
Terrestrial ecosystems remove about 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activities each year¹, yet the persistence of this carbon sink depends partly on how plant biomass and soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks respond to future increases in atmospheric CO2 (refs. 2,3). Although plant biomass often increases in elevated CO2 (eCO2)...
Global change is shifting disturbance regimes that may rapidly change ecosystems, sometimes causing ecosystems to shift between states. Interactions between disturbances such as fire and disease could have especially severe effects, but experimental tests of multi-decadal changes in disturbance regimes are rare. Here, we surveyed vegetation for 35...
Global change has shifted fire regimes, but the long-term consequences for ecosystems are uncertain because of variability in environmental conditions, fire types, and plant composition. We tested how fire-frequency manipulations of 16-64 years affect tree communities and traits using 374 plots from 29 sites on four continents. More frequently burn...
Fire is a powerful ecological and evolutionary force that regulates organismal traits, population sizes, species interactions, community composition, carbon and nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. It also presents a rapidly growing societal challenge, due to both increasingly destructive wildfires and fire exclusion in fire‐dependent ecosystem...
Fires shape the biogeochemistry and functioning of many ecosystems, and fire frequencies are changing across much of the globe. Frequent fires can change soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) storage by altering the quantity and chemistry of plant inputs through changes in plant biomass and composition as well as the decomposition of soil organic matter...
Data: Global map of terrestrial nitrogen and phosphorus limitation
Value: ln-transformed NRE dom /PRE dom.
cell size: 0.0083333333, 0.0083333333
degree extent: top 80.0000159793, left-180, right 180, bottom-60.008317354 degree.
We developed a framework to use the ratio of site-average NRE (NREdom) to site-average PRE of dominant species (PREdom)...
Understanding factors that regulate ecosystem responses to disturbances is a long-standing ecological goal and has been useful in predicting the effects of global change. The response of an ecosystem to a single perturbation does not necessarily predict its response to repeated perturbations—highlighting the ‘pulse’ vs. ‘press’ framework to predict...
Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) limitation constrains the magnitude of terrestrial carbon uptake in response to elevated carbon dioxide and climate change. However, global maps of nutrient limitation are still lacking. Here we examined global N and P limitation using the ratio of site-averaged leaf N and P resorption efficiencies of the dominant sp...
Fire activity is changing dramatically across the globe, with uncertain effects on ecosystem processes, especially below‐ground. Fire‐driven losses of soil carbon (C) are often assumed to occur primarily in the upper soil layers because the repeated combustion of above‐ground biomass limits organic matter inputs into surface soil. However, C losses...
Our understanding of terrestrial nitrogen (N) cycling is changing as new processes are uncovered, including the sources, turnover and losses of N from ecosystems.
We integrate recent insights into an updated N‐cycling framework and discuss how a new understanding integrates eco‐evolutionary dynamics with nutrient cycling. These insights include (a)...
Fires shape the biogeochemistry and functioning of many ecosystems, but fire frequencies are changing across large areas of the globe. Frequent fires can change soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) storage through both top-down pathways, by altering inputs through shifting plant composition and biomass, and bottom-up ones, by altering losses through de...
In tropical regions, fires propagate readily in grasslands but typically consume only edges of forest patches. Thus forest patches grow due to tree propagation and shrink by fires in surrounding grasslands. The interplay between these competing edge effects is unknown, but critical in determining the shape and stability of individual forest patches...
In tropical regions, fires propagate readily in grasslands but typically consume only edges of forest patches. Thus forest patches grow due to tree propagation and shrink by fires in surrounding grasslands. The interplay between these competing edge effects is unknown, but critical in determining the shape and stability of individual forest patches...
Fire frequencies are changing in Neotropical savannas and forests as a result of forest fragmentation and increasing drought. Such changes in fire regime and climate are hypothesized to destabilize tropical carbon storage, but there has been little consideration of the widespread variability in tree fire tolerance strategies. To test how abovegroun...
Accurately forecasting crop yields has broad implications for economic trading,
food production monitoring, and global food security. However, the
variety of environmental variables across time and space presents challenges
and has limited the precision of yield models.
Here, we develop a machine-learning based model forecasting end-ofseason,
or fi...
Fire regimes in savannas and forests are changing over much of the world. Anticipating the impact of these changes requires understanding how plants are adapted to fire. In this study, we test whether fire imposes a broad selective force on a key fire-tolerance trait, bark thickness, across 572 tree species distributed worldwide. We show that inves...
Elephants and fire are individually well-known disturbance agents within savanna ecosystems, but their interactive role in governing tree-cover dynamics and savanna-forest biome boundaries remain unresolved. Of central importance are the mechanisms by which elephants vs. fire affect tree biomass and cover, and how – over long time periods – both fa...
Tropical savannas are hypothesized to be hot spots of nitrogen fixer diversity and activity
because of the high disturbance and low nitrogen characteristic of savanna landscapes. Here we
compare the abundances of nitrogen-fixing and non-fixing trees in both tropical savannas and
tropical forests under climatically equivalent conditions, using plant...
Significance
Predicting the impacts of climate extremes on plant communities is a central challenge in ecology. Physiological traits may improve prediction of drought impacts on forests globally. We perform a meta-analysis across 33 studies that span all forested biomes and find that, among the examined traits, hydraulic traits explain cross-specie...
Incentivizing carbon storage can be a win-win pathway to conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change. In savannas, however, the situation is more complex. Promoting carbon storage through woody encroachment may reduce endemic plant diversity, even as the diversity of encroaching forest species increases. This trade-off has important impli...
Numerous predictions indicate rising CO2 will accelerate the expansion of forests into savannas. Although encroaching forests can sequester carbon over the short-term, increased fires and drought-fire interactions could offset carbon gains, which may be amplified by the shift towards forest plant communities more susceptible to fire-driven dieback....
Nutrients have been hypothesized to influence the distribution of the savanna biome through two possible mechanisms. Low nutrient availability may restrict growth rates of trees, thereby allowing for intermittent fires to maintain low tree cover; alternatively, nutrient deficiency may even place an absolute constraint on the ability of forests to f...
Background/Question/Methods
Disturbance and resource availability are hypothesized to be key determinants of the distribution and functioning of tropical savannas, but their interactive effects are both complex and poorly known. In African savannas, fire and herbivory, especially by elephants, are key disturbance agents, where frequent fires and i...
Fire and nutrients interact to influence the global distribution and dynamics of the savanna biome, but the results of these interactions are both complex and poorly known. A critical but unresolved question is whether short-term losses of carbon and nutrients caused by fire can trigger long-term and potentially compensatory responses in the nutrie...
Fire and nutrients interact to influence the global distribution and dynamics of the savanna biome, but the results of these interactions are both complex and poorly known. A critical but unresolved question is whether short-term losses of carbon and nutrients caused by fire can trigger long-term and potentially compensatory responses in the nutrie...
The expansion of tropical forest into savanna may potentially be a large carbon sink, but little is known about the patterns of carbon sequestration during transitional forest formation. Moreover, it is unclear how nutrient limitation, due to extended exposure to fire-driven nutrient losses, may constrain carbon accumulation. Here, we sampled plots...
This chapter contrasts the authors' epigenetic position with an environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) position, as represented in evolutionary psychology and its intellectual forbearer, sociobiology. In contrast to the EEA/evolutionary psychology position, this chapter stresses the importance of developmental plasticity during early ontogen...
Pellegrini, A.F.A., Soja, C.M. & Minjin, C. 2011: Post-tectonic limitations on Early Devonian (Emsian) reef development in the Gobi-Altai region, Mongolia. Lethaia, Vol. 45, pp. 46–61.This study investigates a Lower Devonian (Emsian) carbonate sequence from the Chuluun Formation where it is exposed in the Gobi-Altai region of southern Mongolia. Qua...
Background/Question/Methods In the tropics, the canopy habitat is a critical interface between the atmosphere and the rest of the forest. Rainforest canopies, in particular, contain resident epiphytes that represent up to 33% of the species in vascular flora. Epiphytes also play a large role in buffering evapotranspiration rates from their host tre...
A behavioral syndrome is a suite of behaviors correlated across multiple social contexts. In this study, boldness in the face
of predation risk was assessed twice in fish across two different sensory modalities in both the field and lab to ascertain
the biological relevance and complexity of this attribute. Individual fathead minnows were captured...