Can fire-age mosaics really deal with conflicting needs of species? A study using population hotspots of multiple threatened birds

 Locations that support high densities of a species (“population hotspots”) have a disproportionate influence on species’ persistence. In fire-prone ecosystems, managers attempting to promote population hotspots of multiple species must understand how hotspot locations might shift with post-fire succession and how much overlap exists in the locations of population hotspots for multiple species. Mangers are then tasked with resolving fire-management conflicts in overlapping locations.
We studied three co-occurring threatened bird species in a fire-prone ‘mallee’ region of south-eastern Australia. We undertook field surveys for each species (1508 surveys; 540 sites; 9-ha each). We used N-mixture models to determine (a) what factors affect species’ density (including post-fire succession); (b) species’ population sizes; (c) locations of species’ current population hotspots and locations that may become population hotspots in the future as the post-fire successional state changes and (d) th...