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

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 pos...

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Veröffentlicht in:Landscape ecology Jg. 35; H. 5; S. 1199 - 1213
Hauptverfasser: Jones, Gavin M., Kramer, H. Anu, Whitmore, Sheila A., Berigan, William J., Tempel, Douglas J., Wood, Connor M., Hobart, Brendan K., Erker, Tedward, Atuo, Fidelis A., Pietrunti, Nicole F., Kelsey, Rodd, Gutiérrez, R. J., Peery, M. Zachariah
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.05.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Schlagworte:
Biomedical and Life Sciences
California
climate
Disturbances
Ecology
ecosystems
Environmental Management
fire regime
forests
Global positioning systems
GPS
Habitat availability
Habitat selection
Habitats
Home range
Land use
land use change
Landscape
Landscape Ecology
Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning
landscapes
Life Sciences
Logging
mountains
Nature Conservation
Owls
Research Article
salvage logging
Small mammals
Strigidae
Strigiformes
Sustainable Development
uncertainty
California
Salvage logging
Wildfire
Functional response
Individual variation
Disturbance
Resource selection
California spotted owl
ISSN:0921-2973, 1572-9761
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung: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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ISSN:0921-2973
1572-9761
DOI:10.1007/s10980-020-01010-y