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In much of the West
and particularly in dry forests in the West.

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We're seeing an increase in fire
and severity of fire.

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We're seeing larger,
more kind of homogenous patches

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of high severity fire
where all the vegetation is killed.

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You tend to see fewer species
coming back to these landscapes.

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We were particularly interested
in how that's influencing

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birds and bats and other wildlife
and these forests.

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Conversely, where we haven't seen fire

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in a really long time, we have a kind of
overly dense, fire suppressed forests.

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We also see a reduction in species.

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We were looking at bats,
and they actually did fine in the burn

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landscapes
and even in the high severity areas

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where we saw fewer of them was when
these places haven't burned in the century

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forest that are really adapted to low
and moderate severity fire.

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So when you see kind of departures
from those historical patterns,

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you start to lose some of the species
that are adapted to that disturbance.

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We have one

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study looking at the 2020 wildfires
in the southern Rockies here

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near Fort Collins, one just kind of up
the slope of the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire.

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There's a couple other East

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Troublesome burned in the Rocky Mountain
National Park.

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So we're looking at large
terrestrial mammals, but with camera traps

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and similar questions like how are these
these wildlife coming back after the fire?

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Are they coming back after the fire?

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In Colorado, we have this
this really big elevational gradient.

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So at the lower ends

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you have ponderosa pine,
which probably burned a lot historically.

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Higher end
you get the subalpine forest lodgepole.

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Those places didn't burn that often.

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And they would burn every 100,
every 200 years or so.

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And when they burned,
they didn't burn pretty severely.

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And so the question is, are wildlife

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adapted to those historical patterns,

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or is there a kind of
a consistent response to fire?

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So if we're seeing more high severity
in these

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historically frequent systems,
that seems to be a bad thing.

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Will we see the same thing
when we have high severity

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up in the lodgepole, say,
where it was typical?

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So that's kind of an open question
that we're trying to answer.

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We have connections with the folks
that are doing the land management.

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You know, every day out in the forest.

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And so we can have partnerships
with those practitioners

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and address questions that they have
about managing these forests.

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We also work closely
with more kind of academic institutions,

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at the universities
on more kind of basic science questions.

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And so we're able to
to kind of bridge those gaps

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and do a really cool science
that's really applicable

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and useful on the ground

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for the huge amount of land
that the Forest Service manages

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across the United States.