Transcending the disaster paradigm: Understanding persistence of animal populations in fire‐prone environments

Keith, David A.

doi:10.1111/gcb.15925

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Furthermore, there is equally the issue of choosing traits most directly responsible for keeping pace with climate change. For example, there is a relatively large number of studies demonstrating contemporary adaptive evolution of heat tolerance (Diamond & Martin, 2021c), but far fewer on other traits such as desiccation tolerance (van Heerwaarden & Sgrò, 2014), salinity tolerance (Coldsnow et al, 2017), acidification tolerance (Pespeni et al, 2013), tolerance of altered fire regimes (Keeley et al, 2011; Keith, 2022), and in sexually selected traits connected to aspects of organismal thermal biology (reviewed in Leith et al, 2022; for specific examples, see Calabrese & Pfennig, 2023; Moore et al, 2021).…”

Section: The Evidence For Keeping Pacementioning

confidence: 99%

When will a changing climate outpace adaptive evolution?

Martin

Silva

Moore

et al. 2023

WIREs Climate Change

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Decades of research have illuminated the underlying ingredients that determine the scope of evolutionary responses to climate change. The field of evolutionary biology therefore stands ready to take what it has learned about influences upon the rate of adaptive evolution—such as population demography, generation time, and standing genetic variation—and apply it to assess if and how populations can evolve fast enough to “keep pace” with climate change. Here, our review highlights what the field of evolutionary biology can contribute and what it still needs to learn to provide more mechanistic predictions of the winners and losers of climate change. We begin by developing broad predictions for contemporary evolution to climate change based on theory. We then discuss methods for assessing climate‐driven contemporary evolution, including quantitative genetic studies, experimental evolution, and space‐for‐time substitutions. After providing this mechanism‐focused overview of both the evidence for evolutionary responses to climate change and more specifically, evolving to keep pace with climate change, we next consider the factors that limit actual evolutionary responses. In this context, we consider the dual role of phenotypic plasticity in facilitating but also impeding evolutionary change. Finally, we detail how a deeper consideration of evolutionary constraints can improve forecasts of responses to climate change and therefore also inform conservation and management decisions.This article is categorized under: Climate, Ecology, and Conservation > Observed Ecological Changes Climate, Ecology, and Conservation > Extinction Risk Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change

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Section: The Evidence For Keeping Pacementioning

confidence: 99%

When will a changing climate outpace adaptive evolution?

Martin

Silva

Moore

et al. 2023

WIREs Climate Change

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“…Demographic approaches can help with the task of disentangling the processes driving population declines under inappropriate fire regimes (Keith, 1996; Miller et al, 2019). By focusing on the fundamental processes that influence population size, such as births, deaths and movement (Begon & Townsend, 2020), demographic frameworks offer a way to identify mechanisms causing population change under recurrent fire (Keith, 2022). For example, Whelan et al (2002) proposed a demographic approach for understanding animal and plant population changes following fire events, with a focus on the life cycles of biota.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A demographic framework for understanding fire‐driven reptile declines in the ‘land of the lizards'

Santos

Sitters

Keith

et al. 2022

Global Ecol Biogeogr

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Background: Fire creates habitats for many animals but changes in fire activity threaten species worldwide. While conservation assessments routinely identify fire as a threat to lizards and snakes, the processes underlying fire-driven population declines have received less attention. Assessing the effects of fire on demographic processes -survival, reproduction and movement -provides a means to identify mechanisms of population declines and forecast population changes. Here, we synthesize how inappropriate fire regimes contribute to declines of animal populations, using threatened Australian squamates as a case study. Methods:We applied a demographic framework in a systematic review to identify fire characteristics and interacting threats associated with population declines in imperilled Australian squamates (n = 88). We reviewed primary literature and conservation assessments on these species and classified fire-related threats according to seven key mechanisms of population decline, five fire-regime characteristics, and eight interacting threats.Results: Inappropriate fire regimes threaten 43% of Australian squamates of conservation concern, including geckos, skinks and snakes. Our analysis indicates that high fire intensity and severity, high fire frequency, and large fires are the main causes of fire-related population declines, particularly via their impacts on survival. Low fire frequency also contributes to declines of some species through reduced survival or reproductive success. Weed invasion and predation are observed or predicted to interact with fire to amplify reptile declines. Our results also reveal a dearth of robust empirical studies on squamates of conservation concern. Main conclusions:The demographic framework applied here will help forecast population changes in a new era of fire. By focusing on processes that are relevant to squamate populations globally, we anticipate that the framework will help diagnose causes of population declines in ecosystems that experience fire, and quantify the consequences of alternative management actions, including urgent conservation interventions after megafires.

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Widespread resilience of animal species, functional diversity, and predator–prey networks to an unprecedented gigafire

Linley,

Jolly,

Wooster

et al. 2024

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Climate change is altering fire regimes globally, leading to an increased incidence of large and severe wildfires, including gigafires (>100,000 ha), that homogenise landscapes. Despite this, our understanding of how large, severe wildfires affect biodiversity at the landscape scale remains limited. We investigated the impact of a gigafire that occurred during the unprecedented 2019–20 Australian ‘Black Summer’ on terrestrial fauna. We selected 24 study landscapes, each 0.785 km2 in size, that represented a gradient in the extent of high severity fire, unburnt vegetation, and the diversity of fire severity classes (‘pyrodiversity’). We used wildlife cameras to survey biodiversity across each landscape and quantified species activity, community and functional diversity, and predator–prey network metrics. We used Bayesian mixed‐effects models to assess the influence of fire‐induced landscape properties on these measures. Most native species showed resilience to the 2019–20 wildfires, displaying few relationships with fire‐induced properties of landscapes, including the extent of high severity fire, unburnt vegetation, or pyrodiversity. Community and functional diversity and measures of predator–prey networks were also largely unaffected by fire‐induced landscape properties, although landscapes with a greater proportion of high severity fire had higher abundance and richness of introduced animal species. Synthesis and applications: Despite prevailing narratives of widespread ecological destruction following the 2019–20 wildfires, our findings suggest widespread resilience, potentially facilitated by evolutionary adaptations of animals to fire. Interventions aimed at helping such species recover may not be necessary and could instead focus on the subset of species that are vulnerable to severe fire. While mixed‐severity fires are often advocated to promote biodiversity through pyrodiversity, our results suggest that such management efforts might not be necessary in our study region. Given that severe fire favours introduced animal species, invasive species management could focus on large, severely burnt areas.

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Transcending the disaster paradigm: Understanding persistence of animal populations in fire‐prone environments

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

When will a changing climate outpace adaptive evolution?

When will a changing climate outpace adaptive evolution?

A demographic framework for understanding fire‐driven reptile declines in the ‘land of the lizards'

Widespread resilience of animal species, functional diversity, and predator–prey networks to an unprecedented gigafire

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