Journal article
Fire regimes and environmental gradients shape vertebrate and plant distributions in temperate eucalypt forests
Luke T Kelly, Angie Haslem, Greg J Holland, Steven WJ Leonard, Josephine MacHunter, Michelle Bassett, Andrew F Bennett, Matthew J Bruce, Evelyn K Chia, Fiona J Christie, Michael F Clarke, Julian Di Stefano, Richard Loyn, Michael A McCarthy, Alina Pung, Natasha Robinson, Holly Sitters, Matthew Swan, Alan York
Ecosphere | Ecological Society of America | Published : 2017
DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.1781
Abstract
Fire is a global driver of ecosystem structure, function, and change. Problems common to fire scientists and managers worldwide include a limited knowledge of how multiple taxonomic groups within a given ecosystem respond to recurrent fires, and how interactions between fire regimes and environmental gradients influence biodiversity. We tested six hypotheses relating to fire regimes and environmental gradients in forest ecosystems using data on birds (493 sites), mammals (175 sites), and vascular plants (615 sites) systematically collected in dry eucalypt forests in southeastern Australia. We addressed each of these hypotheses by fitting species distribution models which differed in the envi..
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Funding Acknowledgements
LK was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions and a Victorian Postdoctoral Research Fellowship delivered by veski on behalf of the Victorian Government. Funding for this project was received from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. We thank the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre and Parks Victoria for support of this project and the studies from which we sourced data. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the Foothill Fire and Biota Project, to Matt White for providing spatial data, to Kasey Stamation for curation of biodiversity data, to Jane Elith for valuable advice on using BRTs and for sharing unpublished R code, and to Claire Moxham for providing fire monitoring data.