The lab is awarded RAPID NSF funding

Kendi Davies and Brett Melbourne were awarded NSF RAPID funding to understand how habitat fragmentation and the Australian megafires combined to impact biodiversity. The fire provides a fleeting opportunity to quantify the location, size and quality of refugia relative to habitat fragments and to set up new biodiversity-monitoring sites within refugia to understand how they contribute to persistence and recovery, particularly of the diverse beetle community.

In the first years following fire, there are three aims:

1) Quantify how refugia relate to fragment size, proximity to fragment edge, and microhabitat type.

2) Quantify the impact of megafire on biodiversity through mass mortality.

3) Quantify synergistic effects of fragmentation and fire on biodiversity and initial recovery.

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Satellite imagery of the Black Summer Australian fires burning through the Wog Wog habitat fragmentation experiment (Image: Sentinel-2). The black squares are eucalypt forest habitat fragments within a pine plantation matrix (bottom squares) and controls within continuous eucalypt forest (top squares).

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Relative to their enormous biodiversity and importance in ecosystem function, the impact of severe fire on forest invertebrates is poorly studied. A long continuous record of beetle biodiversity (over 700 species) before the fire, together with the existing large-scale experimental manipulation of the landscape into habitat fragments, provides a rare opportunity to study how fragmentation and fire combine to impact biodiversity. The study will provide the first data on potential synergistic effects of fragmentation and fire on biodiversity loss and recovery and the role of small refugia.