Abstract Wildfire has been a fundamental component of ecosystem dynamics for millennia. However, climate change, fire suppression, and land use practices have produced larger, more severe, and more frequent fires that threaten a range of wildlife species. Land managers in some fire‐prone forest systems use fuels reduction treatments, including prescribed burning and mechanical thinning, to reduce vegetation density and the risk of large, high‐severity fires. The strategy is to create forest landscapes that are more resilient to wildfire, which in turn will lessen the negative impact of uncharacteristically severe wildfire on wildlife. Yet there is uncertainty regarding the extent to which fire‐adapted species are threatened by novel wildfire characteristics. The spotted owl ( Strix occidentalis ) has become a focal point for this controversy owing to its use of fire‐suppressed forests that have been and will be vulnerable to changing fire regimes in the future. In this study, we attempted to address the question of how spotted owls respond to high‐severity fire in California, USA, by leveraging 1) over 3 decades of detection–non‐detection surveys in 1,514 historical spotted owl territories and 2) global positioning system (GPS) movement data from 171 individual spotted owls. Our study area included 7 national forests, 3 national parks, and extensive privately owned forests in California. Dynamic occupancy analysis indicated that spotted owl territories were more likely to become vacant and less likely to be colonized if they experienced recent and extensive high‐severity fire. Consistent with the occupancy analysis, our movement analysis indicated that individual spotted owls avoided using severely burned forest. Although spotted owl territory persistence was higher in pyrodiverse territories (i.e., those with a mixture of low, moderate, and high severity burned areas), foraging owls showed mixed responses to local pyrodiversity, with some evidence that use of severely burned forest increased when pyrodiversity was high. We conclude that large and severe wildfires threaten the persistence of spotted owls in California. That said, forest restoration and fuels reduction treatments that reduce the risk of large and uncharacteristically severe fires while promoting multi‐scale heterogeneity and pyrodiversity will likely benefit spotted owls and other species that occupy mixed conifer forests in California.
McGinn et al. (Thu,) studied this question.