A century of fire suppression and a changing climate have resulted in increasingly frequent and severe wildfires in the western United States. These conditions have created challenging circumstances for the sustainable management of forest and cultural resources and the conservation of forest-dependent wildlife species. Although many forest-dependent species evolved in fire-prone landscapes, changing fire regimes are recognized as a threat to the persistence of fishers. Fishers were consequently listed as federally-endangered and state-threatened in a portion of California and are a Species of Greatest Conservation Need in California, Oregon, and Washington.
We are partnering with federal, state, Tribal, private-industry, non-profit, and academic partners to fill key information gaps on the effects of wildfire and fuels management on fishers and co-occurring wildlife. Our history of annually monitoring fishers on the Klamath National Forest and neighboring private timberlands in northern California and southern Oregon since 2006 provides long-term data needed to discern the potential population-level effects of wildfire, fuels treatments, and conservation actions. For example, our work on fishers provided the opportunity to investigate the effects of removing approximately 20% of the population to reintroduce them to an unoccupied portion of their historical distribution in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains between 2009 and 2011 (Green et al. 2018). We also investigated the effects of the mixed-severity 2014 Beaver Fire and short-term effects of post-fire management (e.g., salvage logging, replanting) on this population of fishers (Green et al. 2022). We are currently investigating the effects of fuels management and the 2022 McKinney Fire.