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Mega-fire in Redwood Tanoak Forest Reduces Bacterial and Fungal Richness and Selects for Pyrophilous Taxa and Traits that are Phylogenetically Conserved

Mega-fires of unprecedented size, intensity, and socio-economic impacts have surged globally due to climate change, fire suppression, and development. Soil microbiomes are critical for post-fire plant regeneration and nutrient cycling, yet how mega-fires impact the soil microbiome remains unclear. We had a serendipitous opportunity to obtain pre- and post-fire soils from the same sampling locations because the 2016 Soberanes Fire, a mega-fire burning >500 Km2, burned with high severity throughout several of our established redwood-tanoak plots. This makes our study the first to examine microbial fire response in redwood-tanoak forests. We re-sampled soils immediately post-fire from two burned plots and one unburned plot to elucidate the effect of mega-fire on soil microbiomes. We used Illumina MiSeq sequencing of 16S and ITS1 to determine that both bacterial and fungal richness were reduced by 38-70% in burned plots, with richness unchanged in the unburned plot. Fire altered composition by 27% for bacteria and 24% for fungi, whereas the unburned plots experienced no change in fungal and negligible change in bacterial composition. We observed several pyrophilous taxa previously observed in Pinaceae forests, indicating that these microbes are likely general fire-responders across forest types. Further, the pyrophilous taxa that positively responded to fire were phylogenetically conserved, suggesting shared evolutionary traits. For bacteria, fire selected for increased Firmicutes and Actinobacteria. For fungi, fire selected for the Ascomycota classes Pezizomycetes and Eurotiomycetes and for a Basidiomycota class of heat-resistant Geminibasidiomycete yeasts. We hypothesize that microbes share analogous fire response to plants and propose a trait-based conceptual model of microbial response to fire that builds from Grime’s Competitor-Stress tolerator-Ruderal framework (C-S-R) and its recent applications to microbes. Using this framework and established literature on several microbial species, we hypothesize some generalizable principals to predict which microbial taxa will respond to fire.