Avian recovery 22 years post-fire and lessons for survey design in heterogeneous landscapes

The purpose of this study was to investigate 1) what if any impact the Copper Fire (2002) in the Angeles National Forest, California, USA had on nine passerine indicator species 22 years post-fire, and 2) how survey coverage affected ecological inference about species-habitat and species-fire relationships in this heterogeneous dryland ecosystem. Recordings were collected with Swift One autonomous recording units deployed along high-density (250 m intervals) transects in riparian and chaparral habitat, and a low-density transect (500 m intervals) in mixed conifer habitat. Calls were detected and identified to species using the artificial neural network BirdNET combined with expert manual verification at the site level. We analyzed two subsets of the data: 1) riparian and chaparral sites burned by the Copper Fire and adjacent control sites (Copper Fire nexus), and 2) the full elevational gradient of the broader ecosystem (riparian, chaparral, and high-elevation mixed conifer sites) (full ecological gradient). The present data set consists of 14 .csv files with data and 1 .R file with code used to analyze those data. Each file is described below.