The influence of severe wildfire on a threatened arboreal mammal

Abstract

Context

Fire regimes are changing with ongoing climate change, which is leading to an increase in fire frequency and severity. Australia’s Black Summer wildfires burned >12 million hectares in 2019–2020, affecting numerous threatened animal species. One of the species predicted to be most impacted was the threatened southern greater glider, an arboreal, hollow-dependent folivore, endemic to eastern Australia’s eucalypt forests.

Aims

This study aimed to assess how the 2019–2020 wildfires affected greater glider abundance and the resources they depend on in Woomargama National Park, New South Wales, Australia.

Methods

We categorised 32 sites into four fire severity treatments with eight sites for each treatment: unburned (continuous unburned vegetation); refuges (unburned patches within the fire’s perimeter); low-moderate severity; and high severity. We carried out two spotlight surveys per site using the double-observer method, beginning 21 months after the fires. We also conducted vegetation assessments on the same transects. To analyse the data, we used Generalised Linear Models to compare habitat differences based on fire severity, and N-mixture models to model greater glider detectability and abundance in relation to habitat and fire severity.

Key results

We found that fire severity depleted several habitat variables including canopy cover and the number of potentially hollow-bearing trees, a resource that greater gliders rely on. Greater glider abundance also decreased in all burn categories, with the greatest decline experienced in areas burned at high severity. We also found that greater glider abundance was much lower in fire refuges than unburned habitat outside of the fire zone.

Conclusions

Greater glider declines following severe wildfire can be at least partly attributed to the level of vegetation loss and the associated loss of key habitat resources. The contribution of direct mortality to population declines remains unknown.

Implications

Greater glider conservation will rely heavily on protecting expansive unburned areas of suitable habitat and maintaining hollow-bearing trees.