Noun: "the role of varying kinds of wildfire, whether produced by natural conditions or controlled burning, in shaping the environment and biodiversity"
2000, Michael G. Barbour & Richard A. Minnich, "Californian Upland Forests and Woodlands", in North American Terrestrial Vegetation, pages 180-181:
Despite ambiguities in reconstructing presuppression fire behavior, there is wide agreement that a century of fire-suppression management has resulted in a large increase of dead and living fuel, increasing the probability of surface fires becoming crown fires of greater areal extent and intensity. That is, "pyrodiversity" has declined from a once wide spectrum over space, time, and intensity. The likely consequence is that biodiversity has declined as well (Martin and Sapsis 1992).
2001, Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History, page 175:
As vegetation reclaimed these places, they nourished a trophic hierarchy of fuels, a pyrodiversity of combustibles.
2003, M. Kat Anderson & Michael G. Barbour, "Simulated Indigenous Management: A New Model for Ecological Restoration in National Parks", in Ecological Restoration, Volume 21, Number 4, December 2003, page 271:
Each landscape unit is the result of its particular level of "pyrodiversity." They conclude that fire suppression management has eliminated only the coolest burning, easiest-to-control fires, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of fires that occur in wildlands. They argue that any management that reduces pyrodiversity will also reduce biodiversity.
2005, Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, page 18:
Some scientists suggest that pyrodiversity (the diversity in frequency, scale, season, and type of fire) leads to great biodiversity of plant species and vegetation types.
2009, Kent G. Lightfoot, California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction, page 70:
Consequently, as we see later in this book, Native Californians experimented with pyrodiversity practices in an attempt to diversify plant and animal resources and to minimize the risks of serious food shortages through storage, trade, and mass harvests when resources were plentiful.
2013, Erica J. Peters, San Francisco: A Food Biography, page 17:
Pyrodiversity was of these technologies: Native Americans burned grasslands in a loose rotation, every five or ten years, to keep the brush from growing thick and eliminating their favorite seed-gathering spots.
2013, Kathleen A. Brosnan, Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, page 738:
While many groups had staple foods such as acorns or salmon, pyrodiversity offered them great flexibility and sup- port when they could not depend on those staples.
2016, Robert Biel, Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the City, page 62:
A recent study speaks of a ‘complex mosaic of fire regimes [... ] consistent with existing models of anthropogenic pyrodiversity...’ (Liebmann, et al, 2016).
2020, Jeremy Walker, More Heat Then Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics, page 60:
In the words of a recent scientific review of the effects accomplished by the ‘ecological engineering’ of traditional fire practitioners, ‘pyrodiversity begets biodiversity’. This a conscious cultural economy of fire in stark contrast to the organised irresponsibility of industrial pyroculture toward the ecological consequences of its burnings, of enclosed fires hidden behind ignition switches and powerpoints.
