Date: October 19, 2016
Source: Central Ornithology
Publication Office
Two new papers from The Condor:
Ornithological Applications demonstrate the complex challenges involved in
balancing the management of fire-prone landscapes with the needs of wildlife in
the American West.
Salvage logging after a wildfire
can provide economic benefits for local communities that depend on the timber
industry, but what about birds that rely on recently burned habitat for
foraging and nesting? Quresh Latif and Victoria Saab of the U.S. Forest Service
and their colleagues assessed how well mathematical models predicting species
distributions and guiding management decisions transfer from one location to
another. Surveying for Black-backed and Lewis's woodpecker nests in three
locations in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho that had burned within the last five
years, they used the data they collected to develop habitat suitability models
and then tested model performance at alternate locations. While models that
included habitat data collected in the field did better than models that relied
only on remote sensing, the models' overall transferability was limited.
"Broadly applicable
predictive models will require integration of field data from multiple wildfire
locations," says Saab. "We hope that managers will apply the habitat
suitability models for post-fire forest management planning and decisions in
close proximity locations to where the model was developed."
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