Community-level climate change indicators have been proposed to appraise the impact of global warming on community composition. However, factors other than climate may also critically influence distribution of species and assembly of biological communities. The aim of this paper was to study how fire-vegetation dynamics can modify our ability to predict the impact of climate change on bird communities, as described through a widely-used climate change indicator: the community thermal index (CTI). Potential changes in bird species assemblage were predicted using the spatially explicit species assemblage modelling framework – SESAM – that applies successive filters to constraints predictions of richness and composition obtained by stacking species distribution models that hierarchically integrate climate change and wildfire-vegetation dynamics. We forecasted future values of CTI between current conditions and 2050, across a wide range of fire-vegetation and climate change scenarios. Fire-vegetation dynamics were simulated for Catalonia (Mediterranean basin) using a process-based model that reproduces the spatial interaction between wildfire, vegetation dynamics and wildfire management under two IPCC climate scenarios. Overall increases in the CTI caused by the concomitant impact of climate warming and an increasingly severe wildfire regime were predicted. However, the overall increase in the CTI could be partially counterbalanced by forest expansion via land abandonment and efficient wildfire suppression policies. CTI thus strongly depends on complex interactions between climate change and fire-vegetation dynamics. Their potential impacts on bird communities can be underestimated if an overestimation of richness is predicted but not constrained. Our findings shed light on the need of an explicit incorporation of these interactions when using indicators to interpret and forecast the impact of climate change in dynamic ecosystems. In fire-prone systems, wildfire management and land use policies can potentially offset or heighten the effects of climate change on biological communities, offering an opportunity to address the impact of global climate change proactively.