Severe wildfires promoted by climate change negatively impact forest amphibian metacommunities
Description
Changes to the extent and severity of wildfires driven by anthropogenic climate change are predicted to have compounding negative consequences for ecological communities. While there is evidence of severe weather events such as drought impacting amphibian communities, the effects of wildfire on such communities are not well understood. There is likely a differential influence of wildfire on amphibian communities and species. However, no previous research has identified commonalities among the amphibians at most risk from wildfire, limiting conservation initiatives in the aftermath of severe wildfire. We aimed to investigate the impacts of the unprecedented 2019-2020 black summer bushfires on Australian forest amphibian communities.
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We conducted visual encounter surveys and passive acoustic monitoring across 411 sites within two regions, one in northeast and one in southeast New South Wales. We used fire severity and extent mapping in two multi-species occupancy models to assess the impacts of fire on 35 forest amphibian species, within 1.5 years after the 2019-2020 wildfires ocurred. Data has been provided in the form of .rda files which can be loaded into R statistics to view the final results of the analysis, the underlying Bayesian code used and the data. Please get in touch if you would like to use this dataset: chad.beranek@newcastle.edu.au