Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene

Fire has been a source of global biodiversity for millions of years. However, interactions with anthropogenic drivers such as climate change, land use, and invasive species are changing the nature of fire activity and its impacts. We review how such changes are threatening species with extinction and transforming terrestrial ecosystems. Conservation of Earth’s biological diversity will be achieved only by recognizing and responding to the critical role of fire. In the Anthropocene, this requires that conservation planning explicitly includes the combined effects of human activities and fire regimes. Improved forecasts for biodiversity must also integrate the connections among people, fire, and ecosystems. Such integration provides an opportunity for new actions that could revolutionize how society sustains biodiversity in a time of changing fire activity.The workshop leading to this paper was funded by the Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. LTK was funded by a Victorian Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Victorian Government), a Centenary Fellowship 15 (University of Melbourne) and an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP150100765). AR funded by the Xunta de Galicia (Postdoctoral Fellowship ED481B2016/084-0) and the Foundation for Science and Technology under the FirESmart project (PCIF/MOG/0083/2017). ALS was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (746191) under the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation. LB was partially 20 funded by the Spanish Government through the INMODES (CGL2014-59742-C2-2-R) and the ERANET-SUMFORESTS project FutureBioEcon (PCIN-2017-052