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 species richness and geometric mean abundance. We repeated this for six fire-activity classes based on cumulative fire intensity experienced by plots over the course of the experiment. We found that a very limited number of fire treatments or fire activity classes were needed to represent all of the highly diverse ant species and to maximise the geometric mean abundance of ants. We attribute this to the substantial small-scale heterogeneity of fire behaviour and vegetation structure within individual fire treatments. We conclude that high pyrodiversity at larger spatial scales is not required for sustaining ant biodiversity in our study system. We believe that a reserve selection approach is a powerful method for assessing how much pyrodiversity is needed to conserve biodiversity and recommend that it be applied to other taxa and other ecosystems.