Investigating the effects of fire management on savanna biodiversity with grid-based spatially explicit population simulations

Abstract

The development of effective fire management for biodiversity conservation is a global challenge. The highly dynamic nature of fire, the difficulty in replicating ‘real-world’ fire experiments and the need to understand population changes at large spatiotemporal scales make computer simulations particularly useful for identifying optimal fire management regimes for biodiversity conservation. We aimed to develop a flexible modelling approach with which to investigate how the spatiotemporal application of fire (i.e. management scenarios) influences savanna biodiversity. We used existing data from a landscape-scale fire experiment to develop population simulations for the common brushtail possu..