Habitat Use of Pacific Fishers in a Heterogeneous Post-Fire and Unburned Forest Landscape on the Kern Plateau, Sierra Nevada, California

The Pacific fisher (Martes pennanti) is a rare forest carnivore strongly associated with dense, old forest with high canopy cover for denning and resting. The Sierra Nevada population is very small, genetically distinct, and isolated. Mixed-severity wildland fire is assumed to be a potentially greater threat than logging, and land managers are conducting large-scale forest thinning operations under the hypothesis that it is needed to reduce fire spread and severity. However, the relationship between fishers and fire has not been tested previously. I investigated this question with teams of dogs specially trained to detect the scat of Pacific fishers and, thus, their concentration of movements and habitat use. All scat samples were genetically verified. In surveys on the Kern Plateau in the southwestern Sierra Nevada, within unlogged post-fire forests with mixed-severity effects from large fires, and in unburned forests, I found that fishers selected Sierran mixed-conifer forests in both post-fire and unburned areas, and selected closed-canopied, mature/old forest in unburned forests, as well as burned forests that had this structure in the pre-fire condition. When fishers were near burned/unburned edges, they selected the within-fire side. Fishers used dense, mature/old forest that experienced moderate/high-severity fire at the same level as unburned dense, mature/old forest, and both males and females were found deep inside large fires—several km from the fire perimeter. These results indicate that fishers may benefit from the structural complexity of such post-fire habitat for foraging. This suggests mixed-severity wildland fire could be restored through managed wildland fire in these forests.