Abstract
Aim Each year, wild and managed fires burn roughly 4 million km 2 [~400 million hectares (Mha)] of savanna, forest, grassland and agricultural ecosystems. Land use and climate change have altered fire regimes throughout the world, with a trend toward higher‐severity fires found from Australia, the Americas, Europe and Asia, to the Arctic. In 2020, there were notable catastrophic fires in Australia (in the 2019/20 Austral fire season), the Western United States, South America and Siberia. These fires defined much of the global fire year and were compounded by the socio‐economic disruption of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. Location Global. Time period 2020. Major taxa studied Flora and fauna. Methods The Global Ecology and Biogeography special issue, ‘Increasing threat of wildfires: the year 2020 in perspective’, includes 18 papers that catalogue these fire events, their drivers and their impacts on flora and fauna. Results Collectively, these papers highlight the importance of fire response traits, exposure and sensitivity to interacting threats in determining fire impacts. Main conclusions The scale of the 2020 megafires has helped identify new research areas required to more comprehensively assess fire impacts on biodiversity and biogeochemistry and to inform ecosystem management.