Multi-taxon biodiversity responses to the 2019-2020 Australian megafires

Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change. Recent fire events across the globe have occurred over unprecedented scales, affecting a diverse array of species and habitats. Understanding biodiversity responses to such fires is critical for conservation. Quantifying post-fire recovery is problematic across taxa, from insects to plants to vertebrates, especially at large geographic scales. Novel datasets can address this challenge. We use presence-only citizen science data from iNaturalist, collected before and after the 2019-2020 megafires in burnt and unburnt regions of eastern Australia, to quantify the effect of post-fire diversity responses, up to 18 months post-fire. The geographic, temporal, and taxonomic sampling of this dataset was large, but sampling effort and species discoverability were unevenly spread. We used rarefaction and prediction (iNEXT) with which we controlled sampling completeness among treatments, to estimate diversity indices (Hill numbers: q = 0-2) among nine broad taxon groupings and seven habitats, including 3885 species. We estimated an increase in species diversity up to 18 months after the 2019-2020 Australian megafires in regions which were burnt, compared to before the fires in burnt and unburnt regions. Diversity estimates in dry sclerophyll forest matched and likely drove this overall increase post-fire, while no taxon groupings showed clear increases inconsistent with both control treatments post-fire. Compared to unburnt regions, overall diversity across all taxon groupings and habitats greatly decreased in areas exposed to extreme fire severity. Post-fire life histories are complex and species detectability is an important consideration in all post-fire sampling. We demonstrate how fire characteristics, distinct taxa, and habitat influence biodiversity, as seen in local-scale datasets. Further integration of large-scale datasets with small-scale studies will lead to a more robust understanding of fire recovery. Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change, exemplified by unprecedented wildfires across the globe. Using multi-taxon iNaturalist observations and a rarefaction/extrapolation approach to estimate diversity between burnt/unburnt regions before/after the 2019-2020 Australian megafires, we found biodiversity increased after fires, but that extremely severe fires drove declines. This highlights the fire adaptations in Australian fauna and flora, but indicated these have limits. Without or alongside standardized monitoring, citizen science can be used to examine broadscale trends in biodiversity after large disturbance events.image

Automated summary

Conditions conducive to fires are becoming increasingly common and widespread under climate change, and recent fire events across the globe have had a significant impact on biodiversity. This study used citizen science data to quantify the effect of post-fire diversity responses in burnt and unburnt regions of eastern Australia. The findings showed an increase in species diversity up to 18 months after the fires, with dry sclerophyll forests driving this overall increase. However, areas exposed to extreme fire severity experienced a decrease in overall diversity.