The Wildlife Professional - Spring 2010 2009

Managers can locate habitat for these species where, historically, fire would have burned less frequently or at lower severity owing to cooler microclimate and moister soil and fuel conditions.

Allow for movement. Landscapes need to provide foraging habitat and movement corridors, which often require a range of forest conditions associated with different prey, as well as dense canopy or shrub cover. Riparian forests provide valuable corridors in many dry areas, yet can have very high fuel loads and serve as landscape wicks in the advent of wildfire. Prescribed burning of riparian forest will help reduce fuels in these corridors, thus protecting important wildlife habitat.

Leave ‘defect’ trees. Perhaps the rarest structures in managed forests are large trees with habitat features such as broken tops, cavities, and platforms. The importance of these ‘defect’ trees for wildlife habitat is widely acknowledged, thus explicit guidance for retaining these trees is recommended.

Focus on Resiliency

In the face of changing climate conditions, forest and habitat restoration can only be effective if it increases ecosystem resiliency. One measure of resilience is that disturbance should produce mortality patterns consistent with the dynamics under which the forest evolved.

In fire-dependent forests, resilience might be best ensured two ways. The first is to reduce fuels such that if the forest burns, the fire will likely be a low-severity surface fire. This requires focusing more on influencing fire severity by manipulating fuels than on adhering to tree diameter and density goals.

The second measure for resilience is to produce a forest structure that keeps insects and pathogens at low, chronic levels. Drought-stressed trees are far more susceptible to insects and disease, now the dominant mortality agent in drier forests, which can result in large-scale, episodic tree die-off. Fire-dependent forests have persisted through more severe droughts than they are currently facing, but they have not adapted to the high densities and fuel loads found today in many stands. Much is unknown about the potential long-term effects of a warming and/or drying climate. In the more immediate future, however, reducing surface fuels and the densities of small diameter stems may be the best means of creating more resilient forests.

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Epilogue

The Dinkey Creek case surfaced again in December 2009, when all interested parties finally reached a compromise and signed a memorandum of understanding for a fuels-treatment project. The resolution arose from the hard work of the participants, who built trust and found common ground in the understanding that wildlife, particularly sensitive species, historically thrived in frequent-fire conditions.

Credit: Rebecca green a threatened Pacific fisher rests on the mossy limb of a large black oak in the Klamath Mountains, which straddle the Oregon-California border. Old trees with broken limbs, hollow trunks, and other “defects” provide vital habitat for many species and can be retained through strategic fuels management.

Some forest managers express concern that the types of strategies we describe will constrain their ability to design and implement forest management plans and practices based on local conditions. Our intent is not to dictate forest management for specific conditions at the local level. Instead we endeavor to provide a research-based conceptual approach for managing fire-dependent forests, against which proposed management plans and practices can be fairly evaluated.

In fire-prone forests, management inaction is not an option. Wildfire is inevitable, as is the loss of habitat provided by high canopy cover forest. Yet it is possible to integrate the goals of fuel management, ecosystem restoration, and wildlife habitat. We’ve proposed using local topography to produce the variable, resilient forest structure in which forests’ species evolved. As fuels treatments are finally implemented in Dinkey Creek, we’ll be following fisher and spotted owl populations to see how they respond.