Species conservation in a fiery future

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Wildfires in western North American forests are increasing in size, frequency, and severity. In British Columbia, the 3 worst fire years on record occurred in 2017, 2018, and 2021. In many forests, post-fire salvage logging occurs after large wildfires, thus adding a second severe disturbance to wildlife habitat. These substantial landscape changes have unknown impacts on most forest wildlife species, which is of particular concern for protecting habitat for at-risk species. I am deeply interested in understanding how individual animals navigate through these transformed habitats and how these individual choices ramify into population dynamics and community structure. As disturbances increase with climate change, it is important to predict how wildlife respond to disturbance so that we can prevent extinctions. I will thus focus on two objectives: (1) to develop a predictive framework for how fire and post-fire salvage logging affect wildlife at different scales, and (2) to examine how disturbances are incorporated into critical habitat designations and recovery planning for imperiled species. To achieve these goals, my students and I will examine how fire size and post-fire habitat heterogeneity affect mammalian prey species (e.g. voles, mice, snowshoe hares), mammalian predators (e.g. lynx, fisher, coyote), and raptors and owls. Seven graduate students will be trained as we focus on the combined effects of fire followed by salvage logging compared to post-fire effects alone and evaluate how disturbance is included into conservation actions. Students trained with this research will learn field skills, data analysis and GIS, collaboration, and how to disseminate applied and policy-relevant research findings to multiple audiences. This proposed work extends my previous research that showed the importance of fire size, age, and post-fire heterogeneity in determining whether species are present. My students and I also found post-fire salvage logging strongly reduces and delays the return of wildlife to forested landscapes, but we do not yet know how many years to decades these effects last. I have also described the poor implementation of Recovery Planning and critical habitat designation under the Species at Risk Act. Many species lack these mandated protections, and many nominally protected species lack clear protections in the face of increased disturbance. My proposed work will advance knowledge of how species persist in the face of multiple severe disturbances. Forest and wildlife managers will use our results to inform timber harvest decisions and strategies for retaining wildlife on burned or logged landscapes. In conservation settings, our work will inform species listings and critical habitat designations. This work is thus of direct use in Canada, in determining which forest animal species are at-risk, supporting their recovery, and managing forested landscapes.