PARENT SESSION
Oral Session 2: Avian Ecology I: Habitat and Disturbance.
Presiding: D Miles and C Lepczyk
Monday, August 2, 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, Meeting Room A 106.
Effects of mixed-severity fire on bird communities: A before and after comparison from southern Oregon.
Seavy, Nathaniel*,1, 2, Alexander, John2, Ralph, C.2, 3, 1 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, nseavy@zoo.ufl.edu2 Klamath Bird Observatory, Ashland, OR3 USFS Redwood Sciences Laboratory, Arcata, CA
ABSTRACT- Fires in the forests of western North America have the potential to profoundly affect ecological processes, patterns, and interactions, but our understanding of how fires influence animal communities is limited. In part, this is because logistical constraints prohibit randomized and replicated applications of fire at the appropriate spatial scale. One alternative for making ecological inferences is the use of before and after study designs. In 2001 the Klamath Bird Observatory conducted avian point counts and vegetation surveys at 1,000 stations in the Little Applegate Valley of southern Oregon. Later that summer, the Quartz Fire burned 2,493 ha of this area, including 57 survey stations. Surveys in 2002 and 2003 evaluated the effect of wildfire on vegetation structure, bird communities, and abundance of individual bird species. Fire reduced tree and shrub cover at burned stations, but fire severity varied within the burned area and created structural heterogeneity. Relative to the unburned control area, species richness in the burned area declined in the first year after the fire, but was recovering by the second year. This is explained in part by the temporal differences in species responses to fire; species that decreased in abundance typically did so the first year after the fire, whereas species that increased did not do so until the second year. Most species that decreased after fire were those associated with coniferous canopies. This provides a quantitative description of the response of bird species to natural fire that can be used to evaluate the goals and success of fire management activities.
Key words: fire, birds, forest ecology