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Project ID: 04-2-1-106

Year: 2004

Date Started: 07/19/2004

Date Completed: 11/02/2007

Title: Understanding the Influence of Local and Landscape Conditions on the Occurrence and Abundance of Black-Backed Woodpeckers in Burned Forest Patches

Project Proposal Abstract: Wildfire is the predominant disturbance agent in the Northern Rockies. The nearly annual occurrence of wildfire at some point in a larger landscape has served as the environmental backdrop against which our native wildlife species have evolved. A number of native species have, in fact, become dependent on wildfires or wildfire-created habitats and are nearly restricted in their distribution to such conditions. The suppression of wildfires during the past 70 years may have placed many of these fire-dependent species at risk. Excessive fire suppression in the past has also led to the occurrence of more severe fires than would have occurred historically, necessitating fuels reduction treatments to prevent unnaturally severe fires in the future, restore site productivity on heavily burned areas, and protect residual live trees within the burned area perimeter. These activities must be accomplished in the face of meeting the needs of fire-dependent species as well. Unfortunately, while there is strong evidence from the literature that we need to maintain burned-forest habitat for wildlife species, there is little information about precisely how much, where, or in what structural condition. The lack of information is greatest for species such as the Black-backed Woodpecker, which appears to be relatively dependent on dense stands of fire- killed dead trees, and is a sensitive species in the USFS Northern Region for this very reason. This project will investigate the response of Black-backed Woodpeckers to fires of varying prefire management history, fire severity, and post-fire salvage treatments within the mid-elevation mixed-conifer forest types. Data will be used to better understand the conditions needed by this fire specialist, to evaluate the ecological consequences of pre-fire fuels treatments and post-fire salvage logging, and to significantly improve our ability to design future treatments with predictable results in terms of the response of fire-dependent birds. Additionally, the project will provide demonstration sites that will: 1) expose agency officials and the public to basic fire ecology and the complex interrelationships involved; 2) demonstrate how different pre- and post- fire timber harvesting activities can be accomplished while minimizing the negative effects on the most fire-dependent species; and 3) promote a greater understanding for the need to include certain forms of fire in the management of northern Rockies ecosystems.

Principal Investigator: Richard L. Hutto

Agency/Organization: University of Montana

Branch or Dept: Division of Biological Sciences

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Federal Cooperator	Deborah Austin	Forest Service	Lolo National Forest

Project Locations

Consortium

Northern Rockies

Northwest

There are no project locations identified for this project.

Project Deliverables

Final Report ("Results presented in JFSP Final Reports may not have been peer-reviewed and should be interpreted as tentative until published in a peer-reviewed source.")

	ID	Type	Title
	6612	Refereed Publication	Toward Meaningful Snag-Management Guidelines for Postfire Salvage Logging in North American Conifer Forests
	6613	Refereed Publication	Post-Fire Logging Debate Ignores Many Issues
	6614	Refereed Publication	The Roles of Food and Predation in Shaping Adaptive and Maladaptive Behaviors in Postfire Bird Species--Bruce A.L. Robertson
	6649	Field Demonstration/Tour	A Bird’s-Eye View of Forest Fires in the West

Supporting Documents

The following supporting documents are available for this project.

Brief

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