Assessing Vulnerability of Vegetation and Wildlife Communities to Post-Fire Transformations to Guide Management of Southwestern Pine Forests and Woodlands

Wildfire is a natural and essential process in forest ecosystems, but characteristics of fire regimes that have shaped these landscapes over long time scales are changing with climate change and human activities. In some places, changes in fire size, frequency, and severity threaten to degrade essential ecosystem services that produce clean air and water, fertile soil for crop and wood production, and habitat for plant and animal species. Hence, it is urgent to understand how both our actions and inactions contribute to the vulnerability of forest ecosystems and to develop management practices that help sustain and conserve vegetation and wildlife communities in vulnerable forest systems. Our project will address this challenge across a vast region of forest and woodlands in the Sky Island mountains in the U.S. Mexico borderlands and the adjacent Mogollon Plateau.

We ask how have recent fires affected vegetation and wildlife communities in light of both fire history and the ecology of these systems? Data to address this question include field observations of birds and vegetation, information on recent fire histories and characteristics from satellite imagery, and knowledge of long-term historical fire regimes across a vast region of broad national significance. Our team will integrate these data using spatial and temporal models and transfer results and products to resource managers in both the U.S. and Mexico, including managers from First Nations. Critically, we will work collaboratively with a broad community of managers, landowners, and practitioners to develop sets of best management practices tailored to local on-the-ground priorities and goals. Our research team will also create an atlas that includes visualizations of the variable responses of vegetation and wildlife communities to fire. The atlas will highlight degrees of vulnerability of vegetation and associated wildlife populations and communities across broad regions and identify local refugia where changes are occurring more slowly than in the surrounding landscape. Taken together, results of this project will provide new information to help focus conservation and management efforts.