Recovery of southern mountain caribou habitat following wildfire in Ulkatcho territory, British Columbia, Canada

The Ulkatcho people of west‐central British Columbia, Canada, have co‐existed with caribou ( Rangifer tarandus ) since time immemorial, relying on caribou for meat, clothing, tools, and oral history. All 4 caribou herds in Ulkatcho are threatened per the Canadian Species at Risk Act, and the availability of winter habitat is considered a limiting factor in their recovery, with recent wildfires burning much of their critical winter range. We combined traditional ecological knowledge from Ulkatcho Elders with lichen and stand structure measurements at 5 stand‐replacing wildfires to assess the 90‐year recovery of winter caribou habitat. We designed ‘think like a caribou’ methods to capture the recovery of high‐quality forage sites. Bayesian hurdle models fitted to 308 lichen plots found the earliest stand‐level terrestrial caribou lichen recovery at 59 years after fire. The earliest recovery of high‐quality forage sites occurred later at 74 years after fire. Stems per ha of lodgepole pine ( Pinus contorta ) failed to reach suitable openness for caribou within 90 years after fire. Stands were up to 8 times denser than the forest structure of known caribou habitat at the earliest point of lichen recovery. Our findings suggest it takes longer for post‐burn forests in Ulkatcho to reach suitable winter habitat than the general benchmark of 40 years. We posit that the prolonged self‐thinning of lodgepole pine after fire may be a greater limiting factor than lichen abundance for habitat recovery in lodgepole pine forests. Our results demonstrate the importance of adopting a holistic approach towards habitat, one that includes stand structure and lichen abundance alongside Indigenous ecological knowledge.