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Habitat selection by spotted owls after a megafire reflects their adaptation to historical frequent-fire regimes

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Abstract

Context

Climate and land-use change have led to disturbance regimes in many ecosystems without a historical analog, leading to uncertainty about how species adapted to past conditions will respond to novel post-disturbance landscapes.

Objectives

We examined habitat selection by spotted owls in a post-fire landscape. We tested whether selection or avoidance of severely burned areas could be explained by patch size or configuration, and whether variation in selection among individuals could be explained by differences in habitat availability.

Methods

We applied mixed-effects models to GPS data from 20 spotted owls in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, with individual owls occupying home ranges spanning a broad range of post-fire conditions after the 2014 King Fire.

Results

Individual spotted owls whose home ranges experienced less severe fire (< 5% of home range severely burned) tended to select severely burned forest, but owls avoided severely burned forest when more of their home range was affected (~ 5–40%). Owls also tended to select severe fire patches that were smaller in size and more complex in shape, and rarely traveled > 100-m into severe fire patches. Spotted owls avoided areas that had experienced post-fire salvage logging but the interpretation of this effect was nuanced. Owls also avoided areas that were classified as open and/or young forest prior to the fire.

Conclusions

Our results support the hypothesis that spotted owls are adapted to historical fire regimes characterized by small severe fire patches in this region. Shifts in disturbance regimes that produce novel landscape patterns characterized by large, homogeneous patches of high-severity fire may negatively affect this species.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank MG Betts and two anonymous reviewers for providing critical feedback that significantly improved the manuscript. K. N. Roberts and B. P. Dotters provided helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper about post-fire salvage logging on private lands. We thank the many technicians who collected data for this project, as well as staff at University of California-Berkeley Blodgett Forest Research Station who provided housing and office space during field seasons. The U.S. Forest Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and The Nature Conservancy provided funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Gavin M. Jones, H. Anu Kramer, Sheila A. Whitmore, William J. Berigan, Douglas J. Tempel, Connor M. Wood, Brendan K. Hobart, Tedward Erker, Fidelis A. Atuo, Nicole F. Pietrunti, R. J. Gutiérrez & M. Zachariah Peery

  2. Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Gavin M. Jones

  3. The Nature Conservancy, Sacramento, CA, USA

    Rodd Kelsey

  4. Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA

    R. J. Gutiérrez

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  1. Gavin M. Jones
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Jones, G.M., Kramer, H.A., Whitmore, S.A. et al. Habitat selection by spotted owls after a megafire reflects their adaptation to historical frequent-fire regimes. Landscape Ecol 35, 1199–1213 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01010-y

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