| (Jeff Davis approved edits to abstracts due to Sonoma Fire impact on getting paper polished in time) Forest fires play an important ecological role for California's wildlife. However, in recent years, high severity wildfires have become uncharacteristically large, severe, and spatially contiguous. Forest managers utilize salvage harvesting as a mechanism to recover the value of timber lost to these fires and to prepare the area for restocking with conifer seedlings. Past studies have shown that there is an increase in cavity-nesting, insectivorous bird species such as woodpeckers in post-fire landscapes.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife has been operating passive bird recorders as part of the Eco-Regional Biodiversity Monitoring project to determine occupancy and diversity of bird species across large geographic landscapes in northern California for several years and, more recently, broadly across the State. CAL FIRE's study complements that work by focusing on collecting baseline bird occurrence and diversity for stands subject to different disturbance and/or management treatments following wildfire, with the goal of determining if significant differences exist between treatments.
This study utilizes four replicates in four different silviculure stand types on Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest (BMDSF), located in Lake County in the northern part of the California Coast Range. |