Fish and Wildlife Habitat

Background

Rising temperatures may disrupt reproduction before becoming lethal; thus mating traits could define species vulnerability to warming.

Wildfires can dramatically alter water quality, resulting in severe implications for human and freshwater systems. However, regional-scale assessments of these impacts are often limited by data scarcity. Here, we unify observations from 1984–2021 in 245 burned watersheds across the western United States, comparing post-fire signals to baseline levels from 293 unburned basins.

Changing fire regimes have important implications for biodiversity and challenge traditional conservation approaches that rely on historical conditions as proxies for ecological integrity. This historical-centric approach becomes increasingly tenuous under climate change, necessitating direct tests of environmental impacts on biodiversity.

Perceptions of the relationships between forest ecosystems and wildfires have evolved. The ecological role of wildfires is now recognised as essential for maintaining the functionality of fire-adapted forests. Although research on the impact of fire on fauna has grown notably, there is a lack of consensus on its global effects due to the variable responses of faunal communities across taxa.

Aim: Forest disturbances are a natural ecological process, but climate and land-use change are altering disturbance regimes at an unprecedented rate, posing significant threats to biological communities and the species of concern.

Fire shapes biodiversity in many forested ecosystems, but historical management practices and anthropogenic climate change have led to larger, more severe fires that threaten many animal species where such disturbances do not occur naturally.

Wildfire activity throughout western North America is increasing which can have important consequences for species persistence. Native species have evolved disturbance-adapted traits that confer resilience to natural disturbance provided disturbances operate within their historical range of variability.

Animals often rely on the presence of multiple, spatially segregated cover types to satisfy their ecological needs; the juxtaposition of these cover types is called landscape complementation.