Manter Fire Project

The Manter Fire started on July 22, 2000 at Manter Meadow in the Dome Land Wilderness Area of Sequoia National Forest, CA. By August 10, when the fire was fully contained, it had burned over 74,000 acres, mostly within the Dome Land Wilderness Area and adjacent lands to the east administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The fire provides an excellent opportunity to study the effects of a large, stand-replacing fire on a southern Sierra bird community.

Stand-replacing fire is likely to have tremendous short- and long-term implications for numerous guilds of birds, including those that forage or nest in snags, those that depend on a shrub understory for nesting, and those that require unbroken expanses of interior forest. Surprisingly few studies have directly investigated these impacts, and fewer still have been conducted anywhere in the Sierra Nevada. Improved understanding of both the short-term and long-term effects of fire on avian community structure in Sierra ecosystems is needed for predicting the effects of land management decisions, particular those that affect fire regimes, on Sierra bird species.

In the summer of 2001 initiated a multi-year project to study the impacts of fire dynamics on Sierra birds. We focused our efforts on a 30 square kilometer plot in the northwest corner of the Dome Land Wilderness Area.

The study plot includes unburned Pinyon Pine-Jeffrey Pine forest, similar forest that was almost entirely consumed by the 2000 Manter Fire, and a substantial area of chaparral that has developed since a previous stand-replacing fire consumed an adjacent patch of forest in 1950. Our study area thus comprises large patches of three distinct phases in the fire cycle: 1) mature, unburned forest, 2) immediate post-fire conditions, and 3) 50 year post-fire conditions.

View of the western half of the study plot, including unburned Pinyon Pine-Jeffrey Pine forest (foreground), and 50 year post-fire chaparral (light area in the background).

View of the eastern half of the study plot, comprising Pinyon Pine-Jeffrey Pine forest that burned in 2000.

Preliminary Results

During each of the 2001 and 2002 breeding seasons we conducted nearly 400 point counts, arrayed in a grid across the entire study area. Although the fire killed most trees and shrubs in the recent fire area, we nevertheless detected nearly as many (80%) birds per point in the recent fire area as in the unburned forest, and species richness between the two areas was statistically indistinguishable.

Within the recent fire area, overall density of birds dropped substantially at distances greater than 1,250 m from the edge of the unburned forest. Within the unburned forest, there was no relationship between avian abundance and distance to the edge of the fire area. The 1950 fire area hosted slightly fewer bird species than the unburned forest or the recent fire area, but some of its more common species, such as Bewick's Wren, Green-tailed Towhee, Brewer's Sparrow, and Sage Sparrow, were virtually absent from the other two habitats. These results suggest that fire can be a valuable tool for maintaining beta diversity of birds across the Sierra landscape, and that if fire management tools such as firebreaks or prescribed burns are to be implemented, they should be designed to discourage stand-replacing fires greater than about 2,500 m in diameter.

We also opportunistically discovered nests of many species in even the most severely charred portions of the recent fire area (click here to see some nest photos). This finding that even the most severely and recently burned patches of forest may host a wide array of nesting birds should be weighed carefully by forest managers planning timber salvage operations after stand-replacing fires.

2002 crew members Joe Lauerman and Sarah Lauerman.

2001 crew members Jonah Liebes and Susan Jackson.

For more information, contact Rodney Siegel.

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