Journal article
Fire planning for multispecies conservation: Integrating growth stage and fire severity
Matthew Swan, Holly Sitters, Jane Cawson, Thomas Duff, Yoharmes Wibisono, Alan York
FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT | ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV | Published : 2018
Abstract
Setting suitable conservation targets is an important part of ecological fire planning. Growth-stage optimisation (GSO) determines the relative proportions of post-fire growth stages (categorical representations of time since fire) that maximise species diversity, and is a useful method for determining such targets. Optimisation methods can accommodate various predictor variables, but to date have only been applied using post-fire growth stages as the primary landscape variable. However, other aspects of fire regimes such as severity may influence species diversity but have not yet been considered in determining conservation targets in fire planning. Here we use a space-for-time substitution..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Victorian Government's Department of Environment, Water, Land and Planning (DELWP) within the integrated Forest Ecosystem Research program. We acknowledge various staff from Melbourne Water, DELWP and Parks Victoria for advice and access to field sites, especially Wally Notman, Monica Mains, Neville Rattray, Justin Jemmeson and Conrad Annal. We thank Dr April Gloury for conducting plant surveys and Pete Collins for assistance with bird surveys. Naomi Davis, Geoffe Cadiz, Simon Murphy, Peter Mercurio and Tom Fairman also assisted with fieldwork. Thanks to Luke Smith and two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on this manuscript.