Wildlife Response to Wildfire in a Northern New York Jack Pine Barrens

Hannah Cave,Lloyd Staats,Matthew Adams,Tristan Jaeger,Taylor Peet,Mark Lesser,Danielle Garneau

doi:10.3390/f12060676

Abstract

Natural disturbances are an integral part of forested ecosystem function and successional pathways. In many forested ecosystems, wildfires are critical to shaping composition and structure, which, in turn, has major implications for wildlife usage and behavior. In July 2018, a wildfire burned 225 ha of the Altona Flat Rock pine barrens in northern New York. This event presented the opportunity to study how wildlife respond to the immediate effects of disturbance in this unique habitat but also how that response would change through time as regeneration progressed. Game cameras were deployed from September 2018 to September 2020 at two reference (unburned) and two disturbed (burned) sites within the pine barrens. We analyzed total and seasonal occurrences, to determine how usage differed between disturbed and reference conditions, and with time since disturbance. Additionally, for coyote (Canis latrans, Say), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus, Zimmermann), and snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus, Erxleben), we evaluated daily activity patterns and overlap to determine how predator–prey relationships differed between conditions, and with time since disturbance. Over 730 days, a total of 1048 wildlife occurrences were captured across 23 wildlife species. Fifty-seven percent of all occurrences were at reference sites with over 100 more occurrences than at disturbed sites; however, differences were most pronounced immediately following the fire and overall occurrences have grown more similar between the sites over time. Specifically, deer and hare were found more often at reference sites immediately following the fire, but shifted to using both conditions equally by the first growing season. Habitat overlap among sympatric prey (deer, hare) can be explained by understory regeneration increasing foraging opportunities and concealment cover in the disturbed condition, while predators (coyotes) tracked prey availability regardless of the habitat condition. This study provides wildlife management guidance on habitat use and response to disturbance for these unique sandstone pavement barrens.

Highlights

Introduction iationsNatural disturbances are an integral part of forested ecosystem function and successional pathways [1,2,3]
The one exception to this was the gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis, Gmelin) which was only catalogued in the reference condition
Even though richness was equal, diversity was higher in the disturbed condition due to the greater evenness of the most common species, with deer comprising almost 50% of total occurrences in the reference condition, but only 36% in the disturbed condition (Figure 3, Table A1)

Summary

Introduction

Natural disturbances are an integral part of forested ecosystem function and successional pathways [1,2,3]. Disturbance effects on an ecosystem range temporally from days to centuries [4,5], and spatially from small-scale forest gaps (i.e., 10’s of meters) to large-scale events such as wildfires (i.e., 100’s to 1000’s of hectares) [1]. Ecosystem-level disturbance may be biotic (e.g., pests and/or pathogen outbreaks) or abiotic (e.g., windthrow, ice storms, wildfire) with effects ranging from changes in biogeochemical cycling [6], to vegetative structure and assembly [7], to wildlife usage and interactions (i.e., predator–prey relationships) [4,8]. In many forested ecosystems across the globe, wildfires are a natural disturbance critical to shaping regional vegetation [9]. Burning affects forest structure, but may support seedbank activation and seedling establishment by altering microhabitat

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