Community Responses to Fire: A Global Meta-Analysis Unravels the Contrasting Responses of Fauna to Fire

Abstract

Globally, wildfires and prescribed fires are becoming more prevalent and are known to affect plant and animals in diverse ecosystems. Understanding the responses of animal communities to fire is a central issue in conservation and a panacea to predicting how fire regimes may affect communities and food webs. Here, a global meta-analysis of 2581 observations extracted from 208 empirical studies were used to investigate the effect of fire on aboveground and belowground fauna (e.g., bacteria, fungi, small mammals, arthropods). Overall, results revealed that fire had a negative effect on biomass, abundance, richness, evenness, and diversity of all faunas. Similarly, when considering wildfires and prescribed fires the data revealed that both fire regimes have negative effects on fauna. Similarly, fire had negative impacts on aboveground and aboveground fauna across most biomes and continents of the world. Moreover, there was little evidence of changes in pH, moisture and soil depth on soil organisms suggesting that other factors may drive community changes following a fire disturbance. Future research in fire ecology should consider the effects of fire across several species and across larger geospatial scales. In addition, fire effects on faunal community structure must be studied under contrasting global fire regimes and in light of the effects of climate change.