Life Sciences Commons^™

The Importance Of Small Fire Refugia In The Central Sierra Nevada, California, Usa, Erika M. Blomdahl, Crystal A. Kolden, Arjan J.H. Meddens, James A. Lutz

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Fire refugia – the unburned areas within fire perimeters – are important to the survival of many taxa through fire events and the revegetation of post-fire landscapes. Previous work has shown that species use and benefit from small-scale fire refugia (1 m² to 1000 m²), but our understanding of where and how fire refugia form is largely limited to the scale of remotely sensed data (i.e., 900 m² Landsat pixels). To examine the causes and consequences of small fire refugia, we field-mapped all unburned patches ≥1 m² within a contiguous 25.6 ha forest plot that …