Treefrog response data from two-year assessment of prescribed fire impacts in Central Florida pine flatwoods

This data publication contains tabular data from an assessment of the effects of prescribed fires on a pine flatwoods specialist frog, the pinewoods treefrog Dryophytes femoralis, in a frequently burned pine landscape in Central Florida. We compared variation in abundance and survival in a before-after-control-impact study with prescribed fire as the experimental treatment. We used 240 plastic pipe refugia to sample populations in 8 circular plots over 27 months (between November 2019 and February 2022) and 7 independent prescribed fires (1 fire spanned 2 plots). Plots received prescribed fire during the growing season (March - July) in 2020 (N=3 plots) or 2021 (N=5 plots). We removed pipes from the plot before the burn, and from another plot not getting burned that day to control for pipe removal impacts, then returned all pipes immediately after the fire. We observed 1805 individuals with 1790 additional recaptures and modeled population trends and survival using mark-recapture techniques and mixed linear models with a Bayesian framework. This data publication includes tabular frog capture data, tree data associated with frog captures, covariate analysis results, and the R code used to analyze and graph these data.
Pine flatwoods of the southeastern United States were shaped by frequent fires. Today, land managers use prescribed fires to control fuels but also to restore historical lightning-caused fire dynamics. Broad outcomes of this practice are well-understood, but impacts on many organisms are still being explored. Frogs, for example, have upland and wetland requirements, limited mobility, and skin susceptible to desiccation. Treefrogs spend most of their lives in uplands away from water. When fire approaches, animals may escape to an unburned area, shelter or hide in place, or be killed by the fire. We examined which of these mechanisms is the prevailing short-term response dynamic for persistence of a specialist treefrog in a pyrogenic flatwoods system.
For more information about this study and these data, see Biazzo and Quintana-Ascencio (2025).