Blog: Will more wildfire and precipitation extremes mussel-out California’s freshwater streams?
Apocalyptic scenes of wildfires and floods are now familiar to Californians. However, the ecological impacts from these events remain understudied in California and across the world. Gaps in awareness and understanding on the issue are especially intense for freshwater mussels, whose cryptic and sedentary life-histories belie their importance to freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity (see previous post on freshwater mussels). One difficulty in studying effects of wildfire on freshwater ecosystems is that there is often a “right time in the right place” factor to appropriately conduct the science. For example, researchers and biologists often need to be studying a population or ecosystem before a burn so effects afterwards can be quantified – ideally alongside nearby unaffected control sites. Yet such natural experiments are rare because we never know when and where major wildfires will strike.