Ecological forecasting for boreal conservation: fire, owls and woodpeckers

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The boreal biome is a vast wilderness, considered one of the last remaining frontier ecosystems on the planet. The footprint of European colonisation remains relatively light, invasive species are few, predator-prey relationships are substantially intact, and there is relatively little control over natural disturbances. Industrial impacts have been limited to the south but are expanding northwards, and the indirect impacts of anthropogenic climate change have already reached critical levels in some areas. The phenomena of "polar amplification" is resulting in warming rates three times higher than the global average, with possibly enormous and far-reaching consequences that we can not yet foresee in detail enough to plan ahead. The art and science of looking into the future in order to make such plans is known as "ecological forecasting". As I approach the matter, it involves the synthesis of statistical data analysis and computer simulation. This proposal builds on a large body of work to develop the data and methods to enable forecasting tools. It addresses two specific problem areas: wildfire, and biodiversity. We know that climate warming will tend to increase the amount of fire in many parts of the boreal forest. This could in turn cause or facilitate large changes in the nature of forest, with big effects on the forest industry and the humans and other animals who live there. However, the tools available to predict these changes need some improving: they don't yet account for important interactions between fire and vegetation that could partially or largely mitigate the effects of warming, as these are inferred from correlations between recent fire activity and annual fire weather conditions. Biodiversity refers to the entirety of life on earth, but our ability to forecast biodiversity responses to changes in boreal systems is limited to only a very few species, such as trees, songbirds, ducks and caribou. In this proposal, I will expand on my past work on songbirds and ducks to develop new predictive models for species of boreal-breeding owls and woodpeckers. To do this, I will use some extensive but long-neglected data sets that citizen scientists have been collecting over the last 30 years.