Dr Andy Baker

Fostering Biodiversity in Neotropical Savannahs: Fire as a Diversity Driver for Fruit‐Feeding Butterfly Assemblages in the Cerrado The more frequently burnt areas with shorter time intervals since the last burn episode exhibited higher levels of biodiversity compared to sites where fires were less frequent and under longer inter...

"In conclusion, our results underscore the adverse impact of a zero-fire policy on insect communities, including fruit-feeding butterflies, within this unique ecosystem." Freire-Jr et al.

🧪🌍🌿🔥🌳 wildfire 🦋
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation - Nature Communications Fire suppression removes less-extreme wildfires, concentrating fires under extreme conditions. The authors use model simulations to show how this “suppression bias” intensifies fire behavior and effec...

Please check out our new paper in Nature Communications titled "Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation" 🧪🌏

Lead author = U Montana PhD student Mark Kreider!

Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe independent of fuel accumulation and climate change: Nature Communications

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fire facilitates ground layer plant diversity in a Miombo ecosystem academic.oup.com/aob/article/...

figure from paper

Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity 🌏🧪
doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

Map showing the sites of the database

FLAMITS: A global database of plant flammability traits
by Ocampo-Zuleta et al. #GEB_macro

Article: doi.org/10.1111/geb....
Data: doi.org/10.5061/drya...

🧪🌍🪴🌾🔥📈wildfire botany #PlantScience opendata

Substantial light woodland and open vegetation characterized the temperate forest biome before Homo ... Landscape reconstruction using pollen data shows that European temperate forests were open and heterogeneous before modern humans.

Dense closed canopy forests are less "natural" than many global modelers seem to think. Cool new paper about the ecological history of Europe.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Understanding Fire Regimes for a Better Anthropocene

Must-read (open-access) review in 'Annual Review of Environment and Resources'

#FireRegimes #Anthropocene

www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10....

Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Some long-awaited rains quelling multiple fires across eastern NSW over the last 24hrs.

Herbivory limits plant abundance and diversity at restoration sites globally, even more than in undisturbed ecosystems | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

No evidence of a decline in diversity 18 months after the 2019-20 Australian mega fires. In fact, there is an overall increase! with a decrease in extreme fire severity patches
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #@GlobalChangeBio by Gorta et al.

🧪🌍🔥biodiversity wildfires #ausnews #wildoz

Interested in how fire affects biodiversity? 🔥🐦🦇🐝🌿

We have a new paper synthesizing work and building a framework for future research and application focused on the hypothesis that "Pyrodiversity begets biodiversity"

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A little intro post… I’m a lecturer in fire ecology in Australia. Restoring open ecosystems, restoring beneficial fire regimes and science communication are my core passions.

I’ve been a consulting fire, vegetation and restoration ecologist for 25+ years. 👉www.wildsite.com.au

A map of Australia showing the locations of threatened species that only occur in cities. Some plants and animals illustrated. By Elia Pirtle

Did you know that cities are great places for nature conservation? In fact, sometimes they’re *necessary*. Our research found 39 threatened species that ONLY occur in Australia’s urban environments. So we better get better at sharing cities with nature theconversation.com/the-39-endange…