Continental-scale shift in foraging habitat use by a highly nomadic species following Australia’s Black Summer megafires

Extreme ecological disturbances, such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires, have increased in frequency and intensity under anthropogenic climate change, and this is projected to continue in the coming decades. The responses of nomadic species to these events are largely unknown. The Australian 2019/2020 ‘Black Summer’ megafires burnt a substantial proportion of the range of the highly nomadic grey-headed flying-fox (Pteropus poliocephalus). Here, we examine the foraging habitat utilisation of P. poliocephalus in response to this extreme disturbance event by comparing continental-scale telemetry datasets of pre- and post-fire foraging locations from large samples of flying-foxes tracked before (2012-17) and after (2022-24) the 2019/20 megafires. We performed a spatial overlay analysis of foraging locations with static maps of the burnt area and foraging habitat characterised by resource quality (productivity-reliability scores) and coverage (fractional cover). Tracked flying-fo..., , # Continental-scale shift in foraging habitat use by a highly nomadic species following Australia’s Black Summer megafires

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.xgxd254t5](10.5061/dryad.xgxd254t5)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: foraging_data_by_sex_for_spatial_analysis.csv

**Description:** This dataset contains rows representing individual grid cells and columns representing the following variables associated with each grid cell.

**Variables:**

* prefire.fix: Number of foraging visits in the pre-2019/20 tracking dataset (all individuals, regardless of sex)
* prefire.fix.f: Number of foraging visits in the pre-2019/20 tracking dataset (females only)
* prefire.fix.m: Number of foraging visits in the pre-2019/20 tracking dataset (males only)
* postfire.fix: Number of foraging visits in the post-2019/20 tracking dataset (all females)
* fire.sev.modal: Modal fire severity class
* fire.sev.max: Maximum fire severity class
* hab.quality.cont: Con...,