Wildlife ecologists studying the rare Spotted owl in the forests of California have discovered that large, intense wildfires are not responsible for the breeding territory extinction that has been reported recently.
Wildlife ecologists studying the rare Spotted owl in the forests of California have discovered that large, intense wildfires are not responsible for the breeding territory extinction that has been reported recently.
Instead, the researchers found that post-fire logging operations, which are common on both private and national forest lands, were in fact causing the declines in the territory occupancy of this imperiled wildlife species. In areas, where no logging took place following large forest fires, the scientists failed to detect any significant effect in the spotted owls’ territory occupancy or extinction rate.
“This is good news for declining California spotted owls because this is something that we can control–we can make policy decisions to stop post-fire logging operations in spotted owl habitat,” says Dr. Chad Hanson, a research ecologist with the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute and the study’s lead author. His team’s article is published in the open access scientific journal Nature Conservation.
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