Severity outweighs pyrodiversity in shaping avian and bat species distributions following an oak woodland mega-fire

Anthropogenic pressures have altered fire regimes across the western United States. These altered fire regimes, and the megafires they often produce, threaten ecologically and economically critical ecosystems and biodiversity across this region. Oak woodland savannas may be particularly sensitive to altered fire regimes, but there remains a significant gap in our understanding of how different characteristics of wildfire impact these ecosystems and the wildlife species that reside within them. In this study, we used an occupancy modeling framework to investigate how fire severity and pyrodiversity, the diversity of severity patches, impact the distributions of bird and bat species assemblages following a major wildfire in northern California. We used acoustic monitors deployed across the Hopland Research and Extension Center following the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire and compared how patterns of fire severity and pyrodiversity influence habitat preferences across a diverse community of w..., , , # Severity outweighs pyrodiversity in shaping avian and bat species distributions following an oak woodland mega fire

This code explores the impacts of wildfire on the distributions of bird and bat species following a megafire in Mendocino County, CA, USA. Megafire dramatically alter landscapes and habitat that may impact the long-term distributions of native wildlife species. Though these effects have been described in forested systems in the Western US, little work has examined the impacts of these types of fires in biodiverse oak woodlands. Alternatively, certain characteristics of wildfire (i.e. severity and pyrodiversity) may also enhance habtiat for certain species by creating new habitat types and niches for certain species groups. In this study, we use a combination of biodivesity monitoring techniques, namely Acoustic Recording Units (ARUs), and occupancy modeling techniques to describe the variable effects of wildfire on a community of bird and bat species to inform future ma...,