Abstract
Fire shapes the composition and functioning of ecosystems globally. In many regions, fire is actively managed to create diverse patch mosaics of fire-ages under the assumption that a diversity of post-fire-age classes will provide a greater variety of habitats, thereby enabling species with differing habitat requirements to coexist, and enhancing species diversity (the pyrodiversity begets biodiversity hypothesis). However, studies provide mixed support for this hypothesis. Here, using termite communities in a semi-arid region of southeast Australia, we test four key assumptions of the pyrodiversity begets biodiversity hypothesis (i) that fire shapes vegetation structure over sufficient time frames to influence species' occurrence, (ii) that animal species are linked to resources that are themselves shaped by fire and that peak at different times since fire, (iii) that species’ probability of occurrence or abundance peaks at varying times since fire and (iv) that providing a diversity of fire-ages increases species diversity at the landscape scale. Termite species and habitat elements were sampled in 100 sites across a range of fire-ages, nested within 20 landscapes chosen to represent a gradient of low to high pyrodiversity. We used regression modelling to explore relationships between termites, habitat and fire. Fire affected two habitat elements (coarse woody debris and the cover of woody vegetation) that were associated with the probability of occurrence of three termite species and overall species richness, thus supporting the first two assumptions of the pyrodiversity hypothesis. However, this did not result in those species or species richness being affected by fire history per se. Consequently, landscapes with a low diversity of fire histories had similar numbers of termite species as landscapes with high pyrodiversity. Our work suggests that encouraging a diversity of fire-ages for enhancing termite species richness in this study region is not necessary.
Highlights
Fire shapes the structure and function of ecosystems around the world and has done for millennia [1]
Recent and projected increases in wildfire mean that fire management is a chief concern of conservation biologists and land managers in many regions across the globe [2,3]
Land managers often impose fire on landscapes to provide a diverse mosaic of vegetation patches that differ in their fire history, thereby increasing ‘pyrodiversity’ [4]
Summary
Fire shapes the structure and function of ecosystems around the world and has done for millennia [1]. Recent and projected increases in wildfire mean that fire management is a chief concern of conservation biologists and land managers in many regions across the globe [2,3]. A challenge to land managers in fire-prone regions is to provide for multiple species that may have varying responses to fire [4]. To meet this challenge, land managers often impose fire on landscapes to provide a diverse mosaic of vegetation patches that differ in their fire history (patch mosaic burning), thereby increasing ‘pyrodiversity’ (i.e. the diversity of fire histories) [4]. Studies of the relationship between pyrodiversity and biodiversity have reported mixed results—some showing a positive relationship [6,7,8,9,10] and others no clear relationship [11,12,13,14,15,16]
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