Evaluating fire impacts on species and their habitats have become increasingly important as fire activities have increased in many parts of the world. Despite the decades-long advocacy of considering spatial scales in understanding ecological relationships, spatial scaling is still a relatively fresh concept in fire ecology. To demonstrate the effect of spatial scales in quantifying fire impacts on species habitats, we assessed changes in predicted nesting habitat of the threatened Mexican spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) following the 2011 Wallow Fire, which was the largest wildfire in Arizona on record. Our objective was to explore potential relationships between burn severity and changes in habitat suitability at different spatial scales. To accomplish this, we applied a multi-scale optimized habitat selection model to pre- and post-fire landscapes and compared the differences in predictions along a continuous scale gradient.
Results/Conclusions
We show that fire effects on habitat quality were spatially variable and the strength and direction of relationships were scale-dependent. Spatial patterns of burn-severity mosaic resembled the patterns of habitat suitability change. Multi-scale analysis is important in evaluating fire effects on species and their habitats. Fire-effect studies that do not explicitly address spatial scale in considering those effects may be at best uninformative and at worst misleading.