California spotted owl habitat selection in a fire-managed landscape suggests conservation benefit of restoring historical fire regimes

Abstract Wildland fire is a disturbance that shapes frequent-fire forest ecosystems and the life-histories of wildlife species that inhabit them. The California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) is an iconic old-forest species that evolved under a frequent-fire regime in western North America. While recent studies have focused on owl response to large, severe fire events, relatively little is known about how owls might respond to prescribed fires and wildfires managed for resource benefit. Therefore, understanding how owls use landscapes that are managed using fire may offer insight into how owls respond to fire management. We studied the breeding season nocturnal foraging habitat selection of 22 GPS-tagged California spotted owls in three national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon) in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA where natural fires have largely been allowed to burn during the past 50 years and controlled burning has been used to target additional areas. Consistent with other studies of this species, owls selected forests dominated by medium and large trees and avoided areas with smaller trees within their home ranges based on step selection analysis. Owls neither selected nor avoided forests burned by low- and moderate-severity, or high-severity fires, yet avoided larger patches of severely-burned forest (odds of selection decreased by 20% for every 10 ha increase in severely-burned patch area). These results indicated the importance of patch characteristics, suggesting that larger patches reflected either lower quality foraging habitat or increased predation risk, even in these frequent-fire landscapes where “large” severely-burned patches were small compared to those common after megafires. Additionally, selection strength increased for areas burned recently by lower-severity fire and, to a lesser extent, by older fires (largely of lower severity) as the extent of these burned areas increased within individual home ranges. These results suggested that lower-severity fire benefitted spotted owls and that these benefits declined over time. Thus, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that California spotted owls are adapted to historical frequent-fire regimes of overall lower-severity with small high-severity patches. We hypothesize that fire management, coupled with medium- and large-tree retention, likely maintains high quality spotted owl habitat and may contribute to the observed owl population stability in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, compared to declining populations on three national forests. Finally, our results indicated that fire management, as practiced in these national parks, could benefit owl conservation elsewhere if challenges to the reintroduction of frequent-fire regimes can be overcome.