{"id":229258,"date":"2021-04-16T23:52:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-16T20:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/new-analysis-finds-spotted-owls-harmed-by-post-fire-logging-not-fire\/"},"modified":"2021-04-16T23:52:00","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T20:52:00","slug":"new-analysis-finds-spotted-owls-harmed-by-post-fire-logging-not-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/new-analysis-finds-spotted-owls-harmed-by-post-fire-logging-not-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"#New analysis finds Spotted Owls harmed by post-fire logging, not fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#New analysis finds Spotted Owls harmed by post-fire logging, not fire<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n A federally threatened Spotted Owl in Arizona. Spotted owls benefit from Forest fires, but are harmed by post-fire logging, often called ‘salvage’ or ‘restoration’ by the US Forest Service. Credit: Derek Lee
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Are forest fires a threat to the imperiled Spotted Owl? For years, different groups of scientists assumed so, but a new study turns this assumption on its head. Researchers from the John Muir Project, Pennsylvania State University, and Wild Nature Institute found that these previous studies consistently had a serious methodological flaw: they failed to take into account the impact of post-fire logging on Spotted Owls.<\/p>\n

“It turns out that the decline in Spotted Owl populations that sometimes occurs after forest fires is being driven by destructive post-fire logging practices, not by the fires themselves,” said Dr. Chad Hanson, Research Ecologist with the John Muir Project. <\/p>\n

Interestingly, in the absence of post-fire logging, Spotted Owls benefit overall from large mixed-intensity forest fires, contrary to longstanding assumptions made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service.<\/p>\n

“Federal wildlife and public land agencies have a serious misunderstanding of the science<\/a> regarding wildfires and Spotted Owls,” noted Dr. Derek Lee, Associate Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University. “This leads them to mistakenly label forest fires as a threat to the Owls, and ignore the real threat: logging.”<\/p>\n

Forest fires burn in a mosaic pattern. Typically, even the largest forest fires are dominated by lower-intensity effects, where most of the mature trees remain green and survive, and the remainder is comprised by higher-intensity fire patches where the fires create “snag forest habitat”. <\/p>\n