iNaturalist data for: Multi-taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019–2020 Australian megafires

Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change. Recent fire events across the globe have occurred over unprecedented scales, affecting a diverse array of species and habitats. Understanding biodiversity responses to such fires is critical for conservation. Quantifying post-fire recovery is problematic across taxa, from insects to plants to vertebrates, especially at large geographic scales. Novel datasets can address this challenge. We use presence-only citizen science data from iNaturalist, collected before and after the 2019-2020 megafires in burnt and unburnt regions of eastern Australia, to quantify the effect of post-fire diversity responses, up to 18 months post-fire. The geographic, temporal, and taxonomic sampling of this dataset was large, but sampling effort and species discoverability were unevenly spread. We used rarefaction and prediction (iNEXT) with which we controlled sampling completeness among treatments, to estimate diversity indices (Hill numbers: q=0-2) among nine broad taxon groupings and seven habitats, including 3885 species. We estimated an increase in species diversity up to 18 months after the 2019–2020 Australian megafires in regions which were burnt, compared to before the fires in burnt and unburnt regions. Diversity estimates in dry sclerophyll forest matched and likely drove this overall increase post-fire, while no taxon groupings showed clear increases inconsistent with both control treatments post-fire. Compared to unburnt regions, overall diversity across all taxon groupings and habitats greatly decreased in areas exposed to extreme fire severity. Post-fire life histories are complex and species detectability is an important consideration in all post-fire sampling. We demonstrate how fire characteristics, distinct taxa, and habitat influence biodiversity, as seen in local-scale datasets. Further integration of large-scale datasets with small-scale studies will lead to a more robust understanding of fire recovery.

Methods
This dataset represents all publicly available, unobscured iNaturalist records used in final analyses for the article "Multi-taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019-2020 Australian megafires". Only the iNaturalist observations IDs are reported here, to avoid potential copyright infringement. To replicate the dataset used in the paper (without the obscured observations (see methods and appendices for details), use the inat_id column to link to a download of records from iNaturalist. Details on how these data were collected and processed can be found in the "Methods" section and appendices to the article.