October 4, 2017
Remote sensing technology has
detected what could be a win for both spotted owls and forestry management,
according to a study led by the University of California, Davis, the USDA
Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station and the University of
Washington.
For 25 years, many forests in the
western United States have been managed to protect habitat for endangered and
threatened spotted owls. A central tenet of that management has been to promote
and retain more than 70 percent of the forest canopy cover. However, dense
levels of canopy cover leave forests prone to wildfires and can lead to large
tree mortality during droughts.
In the study, published in the
journal Forest Ecology and Management, scientists found that cover in
tall trees is
the key habitat requirement for spotted owl—not total canopy cover. It
indicated that spotted owls largely avoid cover created by stands of shorter
trees.
"This could fundamentally
resolve the management problem because it would allow for reducing small tree
density, through fire and thinning," said lead author Malcolm North, a
research forest ecologist with UC Davis' John Muir Institute of the Environment
and the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station. "We've been losing the
large trees, particularly in these extreme wildfire and high drought-mortality
events. This is a way to protect more large tree habitat, which is what the
owls want, in a way that makes the forest more resilient to these increasing
stressors that are becoming more intense with climate change."
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