Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study

Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—areincreasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communitiesin fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporatepyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animaldistributionsandabundancetosupportpost-firemanagement.Weusetheblack-backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study todemonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitatassessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–2019)from post-fire forests in California, wedeveloped three competing occupancymodels describing different hypotheses for habitat associations: (1) a static modelrepresenting an existing management tool, (2) a temporal model accounting foryears since fire, and (3) a temporal–landscape model which additionally incorpo-rates emerging evidence from field studies about the influence of pyrodiversity.Evaluating predictive ability, we found superior support for the temporal–landscape model, which showed a positive relationship between occupancy andpyrodiversity and interactions between habitat associations and years since fire.We incorporated the new temporal–landscape model into an RShiny applicationto make this decision-support toolaccessible to decision-makers.