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Woodpecker Helps Managers Promote New Life in Burned Forests

Accepted submission by hubie at 2023-06-04 03:00:46
Science

Woodpecker helps managers promote new life in burned forests [cornell.edu]:

"Gigantic, severe fires are becoming the new norm in California due to drought, longer burn seasons and dense forests. But birds do really well in landscapes that are 'pyrodiverse' – areas where fire results in uneven patches burned at high, medium, and low severity," Stillman said.

Black-backed woodpeckers love pyrodiversity. They prefer to build their nest cavities in newly burned areas after high severity fires. But they also like to be adjacent to areas that burned at low intensity, where their young can hide from predators among living trees that still provide cover. Because of the species' unique habitat associations, they are sensitive to the removal of trees after fire, and forest managers use information on the woodpecker to guide their post-fire planning.

After a wildfire, forest managers face difficult decisions about how best to protect and restore the burned areas while balancing the needs of people and wildlife. Sometimes there isn't time to survey wildlife in burned areas, making it hard to choose where to invest in wildlife conservation. To address this need, the researchers developed an online tool to predict the potential abundance of black-backed woodpeckers after fire. Incorporating new information on the value of pyrodiversity made the underlying models more accurate.

"The tool we've created uses data from 11 years of surveys to predict where woodpeckers could be found in the greatest numbers using data available within months after a fire burns," Stillman said. "The birds move in to take advantage of a boom in juicy beetle larvae in the burned trees."

[...] "A burned forest is a unique, incredible and complicated ecosystem that bursts with new life," Stillman said. "At first you think everything is dead. The ground is ash. The trees are black. But as you start walking around, you find that the place is alive. It's not dead, just changed."

Journal Reference:
Andrew N. Stillman, Robert L. Wilkerson, Danielle R. Kaschube, et al., Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study, Ecol. App., 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2853 [doi.org]


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