Intermediate fire severity diversity promotes richness of forest carnivores in California

For 2009 through 2018 we conducted wildlife surveys using camera traps at a total of 1,451 sites across the study area. Our annual survey season began in early August and continued through late November or early December. The duration of surveys was 2–5 weeks, and both camera traps within a hexagon were always surveyed concurrently. We reviewed photos from camera surveys to identify all mammal detections to species. We created a detection history for each site that indicated whether (“1”) or not (“0”) a species was observed for each 24-hour survey day up to 30 days. Average survey duration was 18.7 days. We used the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) spatial database of fire severity of all wildfires >500 ha in the USA since 1984. To measure fire severity diversity, we computed Simpson’s Measure of Evenness (SME) of the four burn category proportions from MTBS (none, low, moderate, high) at both the 10-year and 25-year timeframes. We repeated a similar analytical process for calculating covariates pertaining to time since fire, although the data available allowed us to inspect a longer timeframe than we used for fire severity. Data were processed in R and are available in a .Rdata file. See the accompanying manuscript for a full description of methodology.