Fire regimes and fauna in Montane forests in the Northern Australian Alps

1. The management of conservation lands in fire prone landscapes across the globe has set up a tension between the conservation of biodiversity and protection of human life and property. Compounding this tension is a lack of knowledge around fauna specific impacts potentially linked to fire management activities such as prescribed burning. 2. To determine if fire frequency and prior fire intensity had an influence on mammal assemblages, wet sclerophyll forests across gradients of these explanatory variables, were surveyed for mammals using camera traps. Univariate and multivariate analysis were applied to investigate relationships between mammal faunal phylogenetic diversity, functional diversity and habitat variable. 3. Species data were analysed to determine the relative phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity of fauna across the fire variable gradients at the site scale and the regional (beta) scale. 4. While the impact of increased fire severity appeared to reduce the occurrence of some taxa, functional diversity was maintained at the scales examined. 5. Policy implications. The findings of this study indicate that the phylogenetic measures and functional diversity measures can be applied to better understand mammal fauna community dynamics in relation to the impacts deterministic and stochastic fire events. In turn, fire management can be better informed to ensure biodiversity assets are maximised across ecological communities