In 2016, the Southern Sierra Nevada Fisher Conservation Strategy was released, representing an enormous multi-year effort to map habitat of federally endangered Pacific fishers (Pekania pennanti) and develop recovery guidance. Yet at the same moment, the southern Sierra Nevada was undergoing rapid change. The unprecedented 2012-2016 California drought and subsequent severe megafires produced widespread tree mortality, undoubtedly reshaping fisher habitat—but to an unknown extent. We used 15,666 fisher locations collected from 2002 to 2022 to develop a habitat model for fishers in the Google Earth Engine environment. We used this model to produce a continually-updating 36-year time series of habitat change for southern Sierra Nevada fishers at 30-m resolution. Our work not only provides a much-needed update to the 2016 Conservation Strategy habitat map but will continue to update in the future as new changes to the landscape inevitably occur. Our maps can be used to assess disturbance effects on habitat change, thus providing support for management decisions. In the face of rapid landscape changes from fire and drought in the western US, new modeling approaches are needed to map changes to species habitat in real-time, so managers have the most up-to-date information possible when making decisions.

Ronan Hart (he/him, they/them) recently received his master’s degree in Ecology from Utah State University where he studied the effects of roads and fences on pronghorn and mule deer space use. He is currently affiliated with the University of New Mexico and the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Albuquerque, NM. His current projects involve using Google Earth Engine to create dynamic habitat models for several species of concern, namely the Pacific fisher in the southern Sierra Nevadas. Ronan is passionate about using quantitative methods to answer questions about space-use ecology in the face of a rapidly changing world.