Quantifying the effects of fire on frogs in Booderee National Park

Abstract

Recurrent wildfires strongly affect the distribution and composition of biotic communities, and can also be highly destructive to human populations and infrastructure. Consequently, a number of fire management approaches (such as fire suppression, prescribed burning and selective clearing) are routinely implemented in many countries, with the aim of reducing the risk of catastrophic fires. While some of these approaches are known to be incompatible with the persistence of some plant and animal species, the extent to which inappropriate fire management is a threatening process for frog populations is largely unknown. Any effects of fire on frog populations that do occur are likely to be complex, because fire both kills individual animals, and may also influence frog movement through terrestrial locations (i.e. migration and dispersal). Further research on this topic would also be useful from a scientific perspective, in that frog populations can serve as interesting test cases for the investigation of fire ecology theories, which have typically been constructed for other animal taxa. In this thesis, I address these research gaps on frog responses to fire, through a program of research undertaken in Booderee National Park, southeastern Australia. The resulting papers are arranged by increasing spatial scale, moving from responses of frog assemblages at breeding ponds (chapters I & 2), to frog behavior in the pond margin (chapter 3), to terrestrial movements at the landscape scale (chapter 4). In combination, these studies constitute a detailed investigation of the effects of recurrent fire on frog populations. This body of research represents an in-depth assessment of the viability of ecological theory for explaining variation in frog assemblages following fire. Show more