Winners and losers: post-fire European forest taxa abundance meta-analysis

Abstract Background Climate change is intensifying wildfire regimes across European forests, creating urgent management challenges. Fire acts as a powerful selective filter with highly variable, context-dependent effects. Yet taxonomically comprehensive syntheses quantifying fire impacts on abundance across European forests remain limited. Regional synthesis is needed for informing management and conservation planning, because European forests have distinctive ecological characteristics and management histories compared to more extensively studied fire-prone ecosystems. Results We conducted a PRISMA meta-analysis of 29 studies ( n = 2192 effect sizes) to assess the impact of fire on European forest taxa’ abundances and whether these effects can be explained by taxonomic group, fire characteristics (type, severity, time since fire), and environmental context (ecoregion, biome). Abundance served as the response metric, ensuring comparability across studies and taxa. Taxonomic identity emerged as the strongest predictor of post-fire responses. Fire-sensitive taxa (e.g., Gastropoda , Passeriformes ) declined in abundance after fire, Bryophyta even at low fire severity, while fire-opportunistic taxa (e.g., Hemiptera , Lepidoptera ) showed increases, particularly after high-severity fires and 1–5 years post-fire. Mediterranean forests showed less negative overall responses than temperate and boreal forests, yet fire-sensitive taxa declined severely even there. However, only 13 of Europe’s forest ecoregions were represented, and biome-level patterns often arose from a single nested ecoregion, limiting spatial generalizability. Substantial residual heterogeneity indicates that unmeasured factors play significant roles, and critical data gaps, especially absent prescribed fire data for fire-sensitive taxa and limited long-term monitoring, constrain management guidance. Conclusions These findings reveal ecological trade-offs: fire regimes benefiting fire-opportunistic taxa cause severe declines in fire-sensitive taxa. As climate change drives novel fire regimes across Europe, evidence-based fire management requires strategies that incorporate spatial heterogeneity, conserve refugia, and explicitly consider taxonomic trade-offs. Standardized, long-term monitoring across successional stages, fire events, and taxonomic groups is essential, along with consistent reporting of fire characteristics, functional traits, microhabitat complexity, and refugia availability. Combined with improved data sharing, such monitoring will enable adaptive management frameworks that balance wildfire risk reduction with biodiversity conservation in an era of unprecedented fire regime change.