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

Spatial 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 this new temporal-landscape model into an RShiny application to make this decision-support tool accessible to decision-makers: https://birdpop.org/pages/bbwoPredPostFireDist.php.This data package includes three components: (1) Text files of JAGS model code. (2) .csv files with input data to run models and conduct the analysis. (3) A README file with definitions of variables. Descriptions of code files:Run_StaticModel.txt. Specification of a Bayesian single-season occupancy model for black-backed woodepckers. This model corresponds to the "static model" in the main text. Run using R version 4.1.0 and JAGS version 4.3.0.Run_TemporalModel.txt. Specification of a Bayesian temporal auto-logistic occupancy model for black-backed woodepckers. This model corresponds to the "temporal model" in the main text. Run using R version 4.1.0 and JAGS version 4.3.0. Run_LandscapeTemporalModel.txt. Specification of a Bayesian temporal auto-logistic occupancy model for black-backed woodepckers. This model corresponds to the "landscape temporal model" in the main text. Run using R version 4.1.0 and JAGS version 4.3.0.Funding provided by: U.S. Forest ServiceCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100006959Award Number: Funding provided by: Joint Fire Science ProgramCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100015231Award Number: 19-1-01-5Funding provided by: Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Cornell UniversityCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100018190Award Number