Pyrodiversity Doesn’t Always Increase Biodiversity: An Example from Australia: Research Brief

Site-scale sampling methodologies could be misleading, especially for arid, geographically heterogeneous, biodiversity hotspots. These authors (Taylor et al. 2012) use a landscape-scale methodology to examine one such habitat, 'tree mallee' that has similar fire and ecologic traits to central and southern semi-arid habitats like chaparral. In addition, this study shows that postfire age class heterogeneity doesn’t increase avian species richness in this semi-arid habitat with long fire return intervals.

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Taylor, R.S., S.J. Watson, D.G. Nimmo, L.T. Kelly, A.F. Bennett, and M.F. Clarke. 2012. Landscape-scale effects of fire on bird assemblages: does pyrodiversity beget biodiversity? Diversity and Distributions 18: 519-529. DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2011.00842.x