Research Database

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Following megafires fishes thrive and amphibians persist even in severely burned watersheds

Year: 2025

Wildfires are increasing in severity, frequency and size, potentially threatening freshwater species that adapted under different disturbance regimes. However, few wildfire studies have comprehensively evaluated freshwater populations and assemblages following wildfire over broad spatial scales while accounting for post-fire salvage practices in the watershed. We reveal that stream vertebrate assemblages across thirty 4th order streams, spanning a range of both watershed fire severity and post-fire forest management extent, were minimally influenced by immediate effects of fire alone (…

Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fish and Wildlife Habitat

riparian, fire severity, western Cascades

Publication Type: Journal Article

Pre-fire structure drives variability in post-fire aboveground carbon and fuel profiles in wet temperate forests

Year: 2025

Biological legacies (i.e., materials that persist following disturbance; “legacies”) shape ecosystem functioning and feedbacks to future disturbances, yet how legacies are driven by pre-disturbance ecosystem state and disturbance severity is poorly understood—especially in ecosystems influenced by infrequent and severe disturbances. Focusing on wet temperate forests as an archetype of these ecosystems, we characterized live and dead aboveground biomass 2–5 years post-fire in western Washington and northwestern Oregon, USA, to ask: How do pre-fire stand age (i.e., pre-disturbance ecosystem…

Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fuels and Fuel Treatments

fire severity, western Cascades, carbon

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…

Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fish and Wildlife Habitat

biodiversity, wildfire

Publication Type: Journal Article