The distribution and abundance of ground-dwelling mammals in relation to time since wildfire and vegetation structure in south-eastern Australia

摘要

A temporal mosaic is created by changes in the structure ofnvegetation as it undergoes the natural progression fromnregrowth to senescence following disturbances such as fire,ngrazing or timber harvesting. As a result, vegetationnstructure does not form an even distribution over landscapes,nbut rather a patchwork pattern (McCarthy and Lindenmayern1998; Catling and Coops 1999). There are likely to be manynvariations in patterns. Within one area many habitats cannexist at once, due to the effect of terrain, species’ncharacteristics (Noble and Slatyer 1981), and variationnsuperimposed with a variety of natural and humanndisturbances (Austin 1978; Braithwaite et al. 1993; Austin etnal. 1996, 1997).