Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post‐fire management: A woodpecker case study

Abstract

AbstractSpatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—are increasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communities in fire‐prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporate pyrodiversity or post‐fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animal distributions and abundance to support post‐fire management. We use the black‐backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study to demonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–2019) from post‐fire forests in California, we developed three competing occupancy models describing different hypotheses for habitat associations: (1) a static model representing an existing management tool, (2) a temporal model accounting for years since fire, and (3) a temporal–landscape model which additionally incorporates emerging evidence from field studies about the influence of pyrodiversity. Evaluating predictive ability, we found superior support for the temporal–landscape model, which showed a positive relationship between occupancy and pyrodiversity and interactions between habitat associations and years since fire. We incorporated the new temporal–landscape model into an RShiny application to make this decision‐support tool accessible to decision‐makers.