Monitoring many landscapes in VIC-NSW border to assess impacts of 2019-20 gigafires on wildlife diel activity

1. Climate change is altering fire regimes globally, leading to an increased incidence of large and severe wildfires, including gigafires (>100,000 ha), that homogenise landscapes. Despite this, our understanding of how large, severe wildfires affect biodiversity at the landscape scale remains limited. 2. We investigated the impact of a gigafire that occurred during the unprecedented 2019–20 Australian ‘Black Summer’ on terrestrial fauna. We selected 24 study landscapes, each 0.7854 km2 in size, that represented a gradient in the extent of high severity fire, unburnt vegetation, and the diversity of fire severity classes (‘pyrodiversity’). We used wildlife cameras to survey biodiversity across each landscape, and quantified species activity, community and functional diversity, and predator-prey network metrics. We used Bayesian mixed effects models to assess the influence of fire-induced landscape properties on these measures. 3. Most native species showed resilience to the 2019–20 wildfires, displaying few relationships with fire-induced properties of landscapes, including the extent of high severity fire, unburnt vegetation, or pyrodiversity. 4. Community and functional diversity, and measures of predator-prey networks, were also largely unaffected by fire-induced landscape properties, although landscapes with a greater proportion of high-severity fire had higher abundance and richness of introduced animal species. 5. Synthesis and applications: Despite prevailing narratives of widespread ecological destruction following the 2019-20 wildfires, our findings suggest widespread resilience, potentially facilitated by evolutionary adaptations of animals to fire. Interventions aimed at helping such species recover may not be necessary and could instead focus on the subset of species that are vulnerable to severe fire. While mixed-severity fires are often advocated to promote biodiversity through pyrodiversity, our results suggest that such management efforts might not be necessary in our study region. Given that severe fire favours introduced animal species, invasive species management should focus on large, severely burnt areas. This dataset was provided to the ALA in the CamtrapDP data exchange format https://camtrap-dp.tdwg.org/) and transformed into a Darwin Core event-based dataset. captureMethod: activityDetection

1. 气候变化正在改变全球范围内的火灾格局，导致大型高强度野火的发生频次增加，其中包括过火面积超过10万公顷的巨型野火（gigafires），这类野火会致使景观均质化。尽管如此，目前学界对大型高强度野火如何在景观尺度上影响生物多样性的认知仍较为有限。
2. 本研究针对2019-2020年澳大利亚史无前例的"黑色夏季"期间爆发的一场巨型野火对陆地动物群的影响展开调研。我们选取了24处研究样地，单样地面积为0.7854 km²，样地覆盖了高强度过火面积、未燃植被占比以及火多样性（pyrodiversity）的梯度变化序列。我们借助野生动物相机对每处样地的生物多样性开展调查，量化了物种活动度、群落多样性、功能多样性以及捕食者-猎物网络指标，并采用贝叶斯混合效应模型，评估火灾驱动的景观属性对上述指标的影响。
3. 多数本土物种对2019-2020年的野火表现出较强恢复力，与火灾驱动的景观属性（包括高强度过火面积、未燃植被占比或火多样性）几乎无显著关联。
4. 群落多样性、功能多样性以及捕食者-猎物网络相关指标也基本不受火灾驱动的景观属性影响，但高强度过火占比更高的样地中，外来动物物种的多度与丰富度均显著更高。
5. 综合与应用：尽管主流观点认为2019-2020年野火造成了大范围生态破坏，但本研究结果显示多数物种均表现出恢复力，这一现象或得益于动物对火灾的进化适应。针对这类物种的恢复干预措施或无必要，相关工作可转而聚焦于易受高强度野火影响的物种类群。尽管混合强度野火常被提倡通过火多样性提升生物多样性，但本研究结果表明，在本研究区域内这类管理举措或无必要。鉴于高强度野火有利于外来动物物种生存，入侵物种管理应重点关注大面积高强度过火区域。本数据集以相机陷阱数据交换格式（CamtrapDP）提交至ALA，并被转换为基于达尔文核心（Darwin Core）的事件型数据集。捕获方法：活动检测（activityDetection）