Aims of the project

Our goal is to understand the impact of repeated forest fires on the biodiversity and capacity of Mediterranean forest ecosystems to recover, and to look for the most representative indicators of degradation or recovery dynamics for further follow-up.

The project is situated in the Maures Mountains, in the south-east of France, a Mediterranean ecosystem developed on acid or neutral rocks and soils. It takes both the physical and chemical characteristics of the soil, the organic matter and the biological factors (fauna, flora, bacteria) into account, at several key levels of the ecosystem.

The experimental design enables to study simultaneously the immediate impact of forest fires, the role of their repetition, and the recovery of the ecosystem in the mid term (15 years).

Thanks to this integrated approach combining multiple indicators at several scales in space and time, the project will permit:

• to understand the functional relationships between the different aerial and underground compartments of the ecosystem in the degradation and recovery phases,
• to measure the carbon balance and to make a good assessment of biodiversity and its dynamics,
• to evaluate the global degradation of potentialities, and the ecosystem loss of recovery capacity after several forest fires,
• to choose with a maximum of objectivity, among all these studied factors, the most pertinent indicators, representative of the system evolution, allowing easy and regular follow-up