Nouvel article dans Journal for Nature Conservation

Fire shapes mammal abundance at the Cerrado-Pantanal ecotone: Scale of effect, species traits and land-cover interaction
Clément Harmange, Thiago Silva Teles, Danilo Bandini Ribeiro, Anny M Costa, Mauricio N Godoi, Fabio de Oliveira Roque, Franco Leandro Souza, Olivier Pays 

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnc.2024.126728 

Résumé : In tropical regions, which harbour the majority of the Earth’s biodiversity, land-cover change emerges as the primary driver of biodiversity loss. However, despite the propensity for many tropical biomes to experience fires, and the rapidly accelerating pace of intensification in fire regimes, the role of fire in shaping ecological communities has largely been overlooked. We examined whether and how fire regime affected the abundance of mammal species, the scale at which these putative effects operated and how fire effect interacted with land cover. Using camera traps, we studied four mammal species with different ecological traits in the Kadiwéu indigenous territory, a Cerrado-Pantanal ecotone. Specifically, we used abundance models to analyse the response of mammal species to fire frequency, spatial extent, and time since fire. Our results showed that mammals responded to fire at scales that align with the scale of responses to land cover. We found that the type of response to fire, and the scale at which fire effects operate, depended on species and possibly on their traits. The smallest species Sylvilagus brasiliensis demonstrated a clear response to fire, as well as to the mean patch area of savanna, exclusively at the smallest scale studied (i.e., within 500-m radius buffers). The abundance of this species decreased with increasing proportion of land burned in the 12 months preceding the monitoring. In contrast, larger species, including Mazama gouazoubira and Tapirus terrestris, showed no response to fire, while Pecari tajacu would exhibit a marginal response, at the larger scale of 1000 m. Our results emphasize the importance of adopting trait-based approaches that consider the multiple aspects of fire regimes, at multiple scales, to disentangle the mechanisms governing the effects of fire on biodiversity. This should promote effective and sustainable fire management compatible with systemic conservation of species and ecological traits in fire-prone biomes.