Niche-based approaches enhance understanding of species impacts from environmental disturbances: a case study on the Australian Black Summer megafires

R Code: 

• Hypervolume-construction-pipeline.R details the framework required for constructing niche hypervolumes and associated niche metrics.
• Identify-uniquely-burnt-niche-space-on-the-landscape.R allows cumulative unique niche space burnt to be mapped onto the landscape.
• Creating-supplementary-plots.R shows how all species-supplementary plots were created.

Spreadsheets:

• Supplementary_results.xlsx give species-specific results for all niche metrics.
• Metadata_from_Ward_et_al_2020.csv shows species metadata, as used in Ward et al. 2020 (referenced in paper).

Data:

• Species distributions can be found at the sources listed in the Methods.
• Study_site is a polygon for the study site used.
• fire_study_area is a shapefile for the Black Summer Megafires, cropped to the study area.
• australia_environments.RData is an RData file with the relevant ecological raster layers used in this analyis.

Plots:

• All remaining files are species-specific plots detailing:
  • A: the species distribution cropped to the study area (grey), and the path of the Black Summer megafires (red).
  • B: the species distribution cropped to the study area (grey), and the unique niche space burnt on the landscape (yellow).
  • C: the species entire distribution (grey) and the study area (green).
  • D: A randomly selected representation of that species pre-fire niche (blue) and burnt niche (yellow), according to the first three principal components.