Habitat selection by spotted owls after a megafire in Yosemite National park

As fires in the western United States have become larger and more severe over recent decades, understanding how the changing fire regime affects wildlife has become a key issue for conservation. Spotted owls (Strix occidentalis) associate with late-successional forest characteristics and therefore may be particularly sensitive to structural changes in habitat that result from fire. Previous studies have found varying responses of the owls to forest fire. We investigated the effects of the 2013 Rim Fire on territory selection by California spotted owls within Yosemite National Park, which, unlike the surrounding landscape, has been managed with no commercial logging since the early 1900s and minimal fire suppression since the 1970s. We examined specific habitat characteristics associated with spotted owl presence before and after the fire to understand how fire-induced changes in habitat structure may influence spotted owl territory selection. Spotted owls persisted and nested within the fire perimeter throughout the four post-fire years of our study at rates similar to what we observed in areas of Yosemite that were unaffected by the fire. However, within the fire perimeter, spotted owls avoided areas characterized by > 30% percent high severity fire. Prior to the fire, spotted owls selected for areas of high canopy cover relative to the rest of the landscape; after the fire, even though territory centers shifted substantially from pre-fire locations, pre-fire canopy cover remained a stronger predictor of spotted owl presence than post-fire canopy cover, or any other pre- or post-fire habitat variables we assessed. The importance of prefire forest structure in predicting owl presence after fire suggests that reported variation in spotted owl population response to different fires across the Sierra Nevada may in part reflect variation in pre-fire forest characteristics, and perhaps different forest management regimes that shaped those characteristics. Pre-fire forest characteristics may impart a legacy of post-fire habitat conditions important to owls that commonly used forest and fire metrics do not effectively describe. Further study of owl response to fire in forests with a broader spectrum of pre-fire forest structure and management regimes is needed to better predict and manage effects of the changing fire regime on spotted owls.