Large-scale pyrodiversity is not needed to beget ant diversity in an Australian tropical savanna.

ABSTRACT: The hypothesis that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity is foundational to conservation management in fire-prone ecosystems and has received extensive research attention. However, empirical evidence for the hypothesis remains ambivalent. Moreover, few studies directly assess the key question of how much pyrodiversity is needed to conserve all species within a community. A novel way of addressing this is to use the biodiversity-maximisation approach developed for reserve selection as part of strategic conservation planning. We apply this approach to an ant dataset from a long-term fire experiment in northern Australia to establish how many of the six experimental fire treatments are required to represent all local ant diversity. We identified the treatment combinations required to maximise sp

SUBMITTER: Brassard F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11870973 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature