This recent published paper written by our researchers analyzes the influence of recent forest fire history (12 years prior to sampling) on the occurrence of pyrophilic beetles, which benefit from forest fires, in a 10,000 km² region in Sweden. The researchers used smoke attraction traps to capture beetles at 21 forest sites with different fire histories and developed a new spatiotemporal connectivity measure to assess how the location and timing of fires affected beetle occurrence. They found that the presence of pyrophilic beetles was significantly related to fires that occurred nearby (within 2 km) and recently (within the last 2-3 years), whereas other beetle species did not show this relationship. These results suggest that prescribed burns for conservation purposes should be conducted close to other fires and at relatively frequent intervals to promote the biodiversity of pyrophilic beetles.
