Volcanoes and Lichens:
Comparisons between North and South America
Standing on the caldera edge of Volcan Chaiten, 2012
Both North and South American Pacific coasts possess numerous active volcanoes whose eruptive past has left a legacy of destruction, regeneration and undoubtable adaptation on the surrounding vegetation. Many studies focused on how vascular vegetation responds to various volcanic disturbances. Few have looked at the lichen community responses. Lichens can fix nitrogen, stabilize soil and establish and proliferate in places vascular plants struggle. At the same time, lichens can be extraordinarily sensitive to changes in atmospheric chemistry. For these reasons, lichens are almost certainly important components of the vegetation's recovery post-eruption or good indicators of physiochemical nature of an eruption. This project seeks to document lichen community responses to a variety of volcanic disturbances of different ages in both North and South American Pacific temperate forest ecosystems.
This project initially focused on two Chilean eruptions; the 2008 eruption of Volcan Chaiten in southcentral Chile and the 2011 eruption of Puyehue-Cordon Caulle in central Chile. In 2012 in collaboration with colleagues from Oregon State University, the US Forest Service and the Universidad Australe de Chile, my collaborator Tim Wheeler and I installed lichen community plots and permanent tree quadrats for monitoring the effects of these two eruptions on the lichen communities.
Photo gallery below show the town of Chaiten and surrounding area in 2012, nearly 4 years after the eruption of Volcan Chaiten.
The collaborations studying Chilean volcanic eruptions led to another parallel project sampling lichens in a similar way at Mt. St. Helens, Washington, USA. While in Chile, Charlie Crisafulli (US Forest Service) and I hatched a plan to gather a group of lichenologists to collect lichens in different disturbance zones at Mount St. Helens. In September 2012, C. Crisafulli and I organized a trip with the Northwest Lichenologists. On this trip, I collected systematic lichen measurements while the other lichenologists searched a larger area for more lichen species. This research will be published as chapter on the 35th anniversary of the 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens in 2016.
Collaborators from Oregon State University and the US Forest Service were able to rephotograph most of our tree quadrats at both Volcanes Chaiten and Puyehue in 2013 and 2014 providing us a short but interesting time series of how the epiphytic lichen communities responded to different eruption disturbances through time. Our results from Puyehue-Cordon Caulle are described in the recent paper in Bosque available here. That paper basically shows that lichens survived a range of 10-50 cm of pumice deposition more or less unharmed.
In 2015, with the help of colleague Daniel Stanton of the University of Minnesota, I remeasured many of the lichen plots and rephotographed tree quadrats at Volcan Chaiten. Initial results suggest a different story than Volcan Puyehue. At Volcan Chaiten, there was a much more diverse and violent suite of volcanic disturbances in the areas we could access. Lichens and all vegetation in some areas were destroyed. Seven years after the eruption, there appear to be rapid increases in lichen colonization in the hardest hit areas, both in terms of species richness and cover. The photo below shows one tree trunk through time as the lichen's recolonize the bole. A manuscript describing the disturbance ecology of lichens after the 2008 Chaiten eruption are in preparation. Using the three different eruptions, a general picture of how lichens respond to volcanic eruptions is beginning to emerge and will be described in that paper.
Collaborators from Oregon State University and the US Forest Service were able to rephotograph most of our tree quadrats at both Volcanes Chaiten and Puyehue in 2013 and 2014 providing us a short but interesting time series of how the epiphytic lichen communities responded to different eruption disturbances through time. Our results from Puyehue-Cordon Caulle are described in the recent paper in Bosque available here. That paper basically shows that lichens survived a range of 10-50 cm of pumice deposition more or less unharmed.
In 2015, with the help of colleague Daniel Stanton of the University of Minnesota, I remeasured many of the lichen plots and rephotographed tree quadrats at Volcan Chaiten. Initial results suggest a different story than Volcan Puyehue. At Volcan Chaiten, there was a much more diverse and violent suite of volcanic disturbances in the areas we could access. Lichens and all vegetation in some areas were destroyed. Seven years after the eruption, there appear to be rapid increases in lichen colonization in the hardest hit areas, both in terms of species richness and cover. The photo below shows one tree trunk through time as the lichen's recolonize the bole. A manuscript describing the disturbance ecology of lichens after the 2008 Chaiten eruption are in preparation. Using the three different eruptions, a general picture of how lichens respond to volcanic eruptions is beginning to emerge and will be described in that paper.
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