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

Year of Publication
2023
Publication Type

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.

Authors
Andrew N. Stillman, Robert L. Wilkerson, Danielle R. Kaschube, Rodney B. Siegel, Sarah C. Sawyer, Morgan W. Tingley
Citation

Stillman, Andrew N., Robert L. Wilkerson, Danielle R. Kaschube, Rodney B. Siegel, Sarah C. Sawyer, and Morgan W. Tingley. 2023. “ Incorporating Pyrodiversity into Wildlife Habitat Assessments for Rapid Post-Fire Management: A Woodpecker Case Study.” Ecological Applications 33(4): e2853. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2853

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