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Fire has shaped the diversity of life on Earth for millions of years. Variation in fire regimes continues to be a source of biodiversity across the globe, and many plants, animals, and ecosystems depend on particular temporal and spatial patterns of fire. Although people have been using fire to modify environments for millennia, the combined effects of human activities are now changing patterns of fire at a global scale—to the detriment of human society, biodiversity, and ecosystems. These changes pose a global challenge for understanding how to sustain biodiversity in a new era of fire. We synthesize how changes in fire activity are threatening species with extinction across the globe, highlight forward-looking methods for predicting the combined effects of human drivers and fire on biodiversity, and foreshadow emerging actions and strategies that could revolutionize how society manages fire for …