LAUSR

Fire can strongly influence ecosystem function, and human activities are disrupting fire activity at the global scale. Ecological theory and a growing body of literature suggest that a mixed severity fire regime promotes biodiversity in western North America. Some researchers advocate the use of pyrodiversity (i.e. heterogeneity in aspects of the fire regime such as time since fire or severity) as a conservation index to be maximized. Others caution against this approach arguing that the index oversimplifies fire–biodiversity interactions across trophic, spatial and temporal scales. We evaluated the effects of several landscape‐scale pyrodiversity indices, and their severity and time‐since‐fire components, on species richness of forest carnivores.