California Spotted Owl, Songbird, and Small Mammal Responses to Landscape Fuel Treatments

Stephens, Scott L.; Bigelow, Seth W.; Burnett, Ryan D.; Collins, Brandon M.; Gallagher, Claire V.; Keane, John J.; Kelt, Douglas A.; North, Malcolm P.; Roberts, L. Jay; Stine, Peter; Vuren, Dirk H. Van

doi:10.1093/biosci/biu137

Cited by 56 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…However, absent wildfires, treatments had persistent negative effects on habitat quality and demographic rates (Tempel et al, 2015). Similarly, Stephens et al (2014) found a 43% reduction in the number of CASPO territories 2-3 yrs following implementation of a landscape fuels treatment strategy consisting of DFPZs and 0.2-0.8 ha patch-clearcuts in northern Sierra Nevada MSForests. This study was the first of its kind to monitor owl response to a landscape-scale treatment.…”

Section: Caspo Responses To Landscape Scale Treatmentsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Hessburg

Spies

Perry

et al. 2016

Forest Ecology and Management

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177

190

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a b s t r a c tIncreasingly, objectives for forests with moderate-or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland Pacific US, large, old, early seral trees were a key historical feature of many young and old forest successional patches, especially where fires frequently occurred. Large, old trees are naturally fire-tolerant, but today are often threatened by dense understory cohorts that create fuel ladders that alter likely post-fire successional pathways. Reducing these understories can contribute to resistance by creating conditions where canopy trees will survive disturbances and climatic stressors; these survivors are important seed sources, soil protectors, and critical habitat elements. Historical timber harvesting has skewed tree size and age class distributions, created hard edges, and altered native patch sizes. Manipulating these altered forests to promote development of larger patches of older, larger, and more widely-spaced trees with diverse understories will increase landscape resistance to severe fires, and enhance wildlife habitat for underrepresented conditions.Closed-canopy, multi-layered patches that develop in hot, dry summer environments are vulnerable to droughts, and they increase landscape vulnerability to insect outbreaks and severe wildfires. These same patches provide habitat for species such as the northern spotted owl, which has benefited from increased habitat area. Regional and local planning will be critical for gauging risks, evaluating trade-offs, and restoring dynamics that can support these and other species. The goal will be to manage for heterogeneous landscapes that include variably-sized patches of (1) young, middle-aged, and old, closedcanopy forests growing in upper montane, northerly aspect, and valley bottom settings, (2) a similar diversity of open-canopy, fire-tolerant patches growing on ridgetops, southerly aspects, and lower montane settings, and (3) significant montane chaparral and grassland areas. Tools to achieve this goal http://dx

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Section: Caspo Responses To Landscape Scale Treatmentsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Hessburg

Spies

Perry

et al. 2016

Forest Ecology and Management

Self Cite

177

190

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In some cases, the magnitude and even the sign (positive or negative) of impacts are not readily apparent. For instance, fuel treatments that enhance ecosystem resiliency to wildfire in the long-term may also degrade wildlife habitat in the near-term (Stephens et al 2014). Further, assessments of the nonmarket impacts of wildfires may provide only limited utility for deciding when and where to invest in fuel treatments, since such assessments rarely consider uncertainty and risk, or how wildland fire management can reduce losses (Milne et al 2014).…”

Section: Changes In Suppression Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling fuel treatment impacts on fire suppression cost savings: A review

Thompson¹,

Anderson²

2015

Cal Ag

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High up-front costs and uncertain return on investment make it difficult for land managers to economically justify large-scale fuel treatments, which remove trees and other vegetation to improve conditions for fire control, reduce the likelihood of ignition, or reduce potential damage from wildland fire if it occurs. In the short-term, revenue from harvested forest products can offset treatment costs and broaden opportunities for treatment implementation. Increasingly, financial analysis of fuel treatments is also incorporating long-term savings through reduced fire suppression costs, which can be difficult to quantify. This paper reviews the findings and lessons from recent modeling work evaluating the potential relationship between fuel treatments and avoided fire suppression costs. Across studies, treatments are generally predicted to reduce future fire suppression costs, although the magnitude of savings is unlikely to fully offset fuel treatment costs. This funding gap highlights the importance of forest product revenues in facilitating landscape-scale treatment. Factors influencing the effects of fuel treatment investments on fire suppression costs include the causal pathway linking treatment inputs to suppression cost outcomes; the spatiotemporal uncertainty of wildfire-treatment interactions; and the scale of fuel treatment programs.

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“…Increased logging of unburned forests has been proposed as a measure to curb fire behaviour (Jones et al 2016), but such logging has been associated with a substantial and rapid loss of site occupancy (Stephens et al 2014). Based on these results here and other research, it is suggested that such increased logging and the weakening of environmental protections that would be needed to facilitate it, are not a scientifically sound path forward towards recovery and conservation of declining California spotted owl populations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Post-fire logging and tree plantation establishment have also been promoted by the U.S. Forest Service in high-severity fire areas in an attempt to recover and restore mature, green forest cover (Peterson et al 2015). However, these results and other research (Lee et al 2013), indicate that post-fire logging of complex early seral forests is not consistent with California spotted owl conservation and mechanical thinning has been associated with dramatic and rapid population declines for this subspecies in the Sierra Nevada (Stephens et al 2014). Further, multiple studies have indicated that there is no long-term increasing trend in high-severity fires in the Sierra Nevada Odion 2015, Keyser andWesterling 2017), or in the vast majority of the western U.S. (Keyser and Westerling 2017) since 1984.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of post-fire logging on California spotted owl occupancy

Hanson¹,

Bond²,

Lee³

2018

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In fire-adapted forest ecosystems around the world, there has been growing concern about adverse impacts of post-fire logging on native biodiversity and ecological processes. This is also true in conifer forests of California, U.S.A. which are home to a rare and declining owl subspecies, the California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis). While there has been recent concern about the California spotted owl occupancy in large fire areas where some territories have substantial high-severity fire effects, the influence of post-fire logging on the California spotted owl occupancy has been investigated very little, leading to some uncertainty about interpretation of conflicting results in different large fires. Research has found these owls preferentially select high-severity fire areas, characterised by high levels of snags and native shrubs, for foraging in forests that were not logged after fire, suggesting that removal of this foraging habitat might impact occupancy. The authors assessed the effect of post-fire logging and high-severity fire, on occupancy of this subspecies in eight large fire areas, within spotted owl sites with two different levels of high-severity fire effects. They found a significant adverse effect of such logging and no effect of high-severity fire alone. These results indicate it is post-fire logging, not large fires themselves, that poses a conservation threat to this imperilled species. RESEARCH ARTICLE Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservation A peer-reviewed open-access journalChad T. Hanson et al. / Nature Conservation 24: 93-105 (2018) 94

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California Spotted Owl, Songbird, and Small Mammal Responses to Landscape Fuel Treatments

Cited by 56 publications

References 60 publications

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Modeling fuel treatment impacts on fire suppression cost savings: A review

Effects of post-fire logging on California spotted owl occupancy

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