Is it true that forest and land fires caused the extinction of biodiversity…?

Abstract

Every year forest fire are raging across Indonesia, causing economic and ecological losses. The thought that forest fire is pushing species towards extinction resulted in a lawsuit against fires in industrial forest, although the lawsuit sometimes are not based on scientifically studies. Since 2015 some studies has been held to learn more about the effect of forest fire on species diversity. Based on the word meaning of extinction, it shows that forest fires did not cause an extinction of a species, when a species is extinct or gone in some areas but still can be found in another areas, it is called extirpation. Extinct is when no doubt that the last individual species in the world is died. Furthermore, based on many researches that have been held before, 29% research showed that the fire impact on the decrease of the species number, while 58% showed the increasing impact and 13% resulted in no change. In line with that, the impact on species richness resulted with 27% of decrease, 61% increase, 12% has no change. Meanwhile on the impact of species composition, 33% research mention that there are change 50-75% in species composition and 67% research mention that there are <50% change in species composition. The opposite of the most lawsuit that has been given, it showed that fire impact tends to increase the number of species and species richness, compared to the value of the decrease, with tendencies that the change in species composition is not significant (<50%). In conclusion, forest fire did not result in species extinction, it results in the form of a decrease and or even an increase in the number of species or species richness index and changes in species composition.