Wildlife and Fire: Improving Habitat Management Through Monitoring and Adaptation

In January, the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, USDA Forest Service, Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, and many other partners hosted a two-day workshop on the intersection of wildlife and fire. Based on the needs identified in the workshop, this collaborative group is hosting a yearlong series of workshops, webinars, and reports to improve wildlife outcomes in the face of fire and climate change. This series is intended to help researchers and practitioners across fire and wildlife disciplines exchange ideas, tools, and lessons to address the rapid pace and scale of fire management.

In the third webinar of this series, a panel of experts discuss informing wildlife habitat management through monitoring and adaptation at the intersection of fire, climate change, and human encroachment. Topics will include how monitoring may be expanded to the big picture - habitat associations, animal distributions across space and time, and the associated changes therein - by harnessing "big data"; monitoring frameworks for addressing vulnerability of wildlife and their habitats to climate change using Mexican Spotted Owl as an example; using the study of animal movement in response to changing fire regimes to inform conservation and human-wildlife coexistence; and holistic management of wildlife habitat when addressing fuels reduction, especially in pinyon juniper ecosystems. 

Panelists

• Andrew Stillman, Postdoctoral Fellow,  Cornell Lab of Ornithology Center for Avian Population Studies
• Joshua Goldberg, Station Statistician, Pacific Northwest Research Station
• Valerie Stein Foster, Wildlife Biologist and Interim Partners in Flight U.S. Coordinator, USDA Forest Service
• Rachel Blakey, Assistant Professor of Global Change Biology, Department of Biological Sciences, Cal Poly Pomona