Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2021 number 3

This paper suggests that the comparative-geographical approach should be used in the study of the recovery of post-pyrogenic communities of soil invertebrates. This method greatly eases identification of the state of soil zoocenoses; furthermore, it improves the efficiency of assessment and the direction of the course of successions of disturbed landscapes in forest geosystems in the south of Eastern Siberia. The direct effect of fire on vegetation cover and on the upper soil layers causes catastrophic changes in the “living space” for the invertebrates living in soils. Even fires of short duration lead to significant changes in the structural and numerical characteristics of soil zoocenoses. The recovery mechanisms of soil biotic communities are initiated almost immediately after the end of the ignition. However, the course of recovery processes proceeds depending on the microclimatic conditions and the location of the territory. At the initial stages of recovery, in damaged areas, an “ecotonic effect” arises, the operation of which is gradually leveled out (under certain conditions) and further changes in post-pyrogenic communities proceed along the path of increasing taxonomic diversity, restoring the structure of the population and increasing the bioproductivity of soil zoocenoses. The limited migration capacity of the soil biota, combined with its dependence on many external factors (physicochemical, microclimatic, etc.), makes it possible to use the statistical information obtained as the most reliable in ecological monitoring of the state of landscapes experiencing various external influences. Soil invertebrate communities are becoming some of the most convenient test objects for transformation in regenerating ecosystems. Studies aimed at understanding the formation of the “response” of soil zoocenoses using a comparative geographical approach permit the predicted level to be reached.