Associations between occupancy and habitat structure can predict avian responses to disturbance: Implications for conservation management

Abstract

Increasingly, fire is used as a management tool to mitigate wildfire risk and conserve biodiversity. Use of time since disturbance as a surrogate for faunal occurrence presents an appealing basis for biodiversity conservation; however, successional change in resource availability is often the direct driver of change in animal occurrence rather than time per se, and rates of resource development can be highly variable. To facilitate prediction of animal responses to disturbance, we sought to test whether time since fire (TSF) and habitat structure can predict bird occurrence. Time is only expected to predict occurrence if (i) species respond to structural resources and (ii) the abundance of t..