Research Database
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Frequent, heterogenous fire supports a forest owl assemblage
Year: 2025
Fire shapes biodiversity in many forested ecosystems, but historical management practices and anthropogenic climate change have led to larger, more severe fires that threaten many animal species where such disturbances do not occur naturally. As predators, owls can play important ecological roles in biological communities, but how changing fire regimes affect individual species and species assemblages is largely unknown. Here, we examined the impact of fire severity, history, and configuration over the past 35 years on an assemblage of six forest owl species in the Sierra Nevada, California,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severity of a megafire reduced by interactions of wildland fire suppression operations and previous burns
Year: 2024
Burned area and proportion of high severity fire have been increasing in the western USA, and reducing wildfire severity with fuel treatments or other means is key for maintaining fire-prone dry forests and avoiding fire-catalyzed forest loss. Despite the unprecedented scope of firefighting operations in recent years, their contribution to patterns of wildfire severity is rarely quantified. Here we investigate how wildland fire suppression operations and past fire severity interacted to affect severity patterns of the northern third of the 374 000 ha Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Songbird response to wildfire in mixed-conifer forest in south-western Oregon
Year: 2014
We used 1 year of pre-fire and 4 years of post-fire data to quantify changes in the occurrence of birds at burned and unburned sites in a southern Oregon watershed after a 2500-ha wildfire. Our objectives were to identify bird species that increased or decreased as a result of this mixed-severity fire. Of the 27 species we investigated, we found evidence for fire-induced changes in the proportion of sites occupied by 13 species. Of these, most (8 species) were species that occurred at fewer sites after the fire than before. These changes were consistent with changes in vegetation composition…
Publication Type: Journal Article