Fire is one of Earth's most potent agents of ecological change. This Special Issue comes in the wake of a series of extreme wildfires across the world, from the Amazon, to Siberia, California, Portugal, South Africa and eastern Australia (Duane et al., 2021). These “megafires,” variously defined according to their size, intensity, or impacts (Attiwill & Binkley, 2013), are perhaps the signature feature of Earth's fiery transition to what Pyne (2020) has termed the “Pyrocene.” Projections of increased fire weather and extended fire seasons portend an increasingly flammable planet (Ellis et al.; Jain et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2021). Recent megafires have alarmed conservation scientists and practitioners because their scale and intensity demands new ways of thinking about biodiversity conservation in fire-prone landscapes, and, potentially, new tools tailored to avoid or minimise fire-induced declines and extinctions (Wintle et al., 2020). Megafires have the potential to transform landscapes at a speed and scale unmatched by most abiotic disturbances. Urgent questions remain regarding how ecosystems are affected by, and recover from, megafires (Jolly et al., 2022); the effectiveness of interventions aimed at minimising decline and promoting recovery of species, communities, and ecosystems following megafire (Wintle et al., 2020); how to best monitor the ecological impacts of megafire, and how to prioritise conservation investment within increasingly massive fire footprints (Southwell et al., 2022). This Special Issue of Diversity and Distributions grapples with some of these complexities and challenges.