fish and wildlife habitat

Management in fire-prone ecosystems relies widely upon application of prescribed fire and/or fire surrogate (e.g., forest thinning) treatments to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function. Recently, published literature examining wildlife response to fire and fire management has increased rapidly.

Climate change is a poorly understood, emerging threat to many amphibian species. One of the ways climate change is likely to affect amphibians is through increased recruitment failure associated with more frequent climatic extremes.

Wildfire effects upon riparian plant community structure, composition, and distribution may strongly influence the dynamic relationships between riparian vegetation and stream ecosystems. However, few studies have examined the influence of fire on these processes.

Public land managers are asked to minimize fuel levels after fi res, including using techniques such as salvage logging. They are also responsible for maintaining suitable wildlife habitat, especially for species of concern to state and federal agencies.

We investigated the midterm effects of wildfire (in this case, five years after the fire) of varying severity on periphyton, benthic invertebrates, emerging adult aquatic insects, spiders, and bats by comparing unburned sites with those exposed to low severity (riparian vegetation burned but canopy intact) and high severity (canopy completely removed) wildfire.

Northern spotted owls are known to spend time in areas burned by wildfire, but there has been little scientific investigation of how and why they use these landscapes.

This project took advantage of pre-fi re data gathered within the perimeter of Colorado’s 2002 Hayman Fire. Researchers studied the unique fi re regime of Front Range ponderosa pine forests, and fi re effects on understory-plant communities and American Three-toed Woodpeckers.

In forests, high-severity burn patches—whereinmost or all of the trees are killed by fire—often occur within amosaic of low- and moderate-severity effects.