| The importance of natural forest fires is expected to increase in European boreal landscapes. However, due to scarcity of fires since the middle of 19th century, the scientific base for effective, biodiversity-oriented post-fire management is very scarce.
The aim of the proposed research is to find out how bird communities of Swedish boreal forests respond to different post-fire management. We will compare post-fire succession of bird communities in naturally regenerating and salvage-logged areas. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to provide forest managers and conservation authorities with necessary knowledge needed for management of forest biodiversity, specifically forest birds, in relation to forest fires. Recommendations concerning necessary levels of post-fire retention needed at the landscape scale to support avian diversity will be delivered.
In this project that is planned for two years, we will compare post-fire succession of bird communities in naturally regenerating and salvage-logged areas using bird censuses (2015-2020) in the forest landscape affected by big fire in 2014 (Västmanland). We found that the two treatments had an obvious effect on bird communities already in the initial phase (2015-2016) with slightly higher species richness and abundance in protected parts of the burned area in comparison to salvage logged. Also, the community composition differed significantly. The current project will make use of already collected bird data (4 seasons) and add two more years so in total 6 years of succession will be covered. In the above scheme, birds are counted in 112 permanent points visited 3 times in the period March-June. Roughly half of the points are located in protected landscape and in the other half in salvage-logged landscape with different levels of retention. We will use forest structure, fire intensity and the level of retention at the landscape scale as the main explanatory variables employing available remote sensing data, other existing forest and landscape data and new data collected in the field. The bird community structure and composition will be modelled using landscape and stand level variables and protection or salvage logging management. First, we will model occurrence or abundance of single species using logistic regression to select winners and losers of different management schemes and to check how the species occurrences change over time since fire. Next, we will analyze variation of the whole bird community by modelling species richness and abundance using generalized linear models.
Our project is in line with the interest of “Stiftelsen Oscar och Lili Lamms Minne”. First, knowing how to treat forests affected by fire (natural succession, salvage-log or mixture of it) is important for local management of forest birds including species of high conservation interest (e.g. three-toed woodpecker). Second, since the knowledge concerning the post-fire management is very scarce in Fennoscandia, our project is highly relevant for landscape-level conservation. This is particularly important in the expected increase of natural forest fires in this part of Europe and also to create references for prescribed burning that is more commonly used as conservation measure.
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