LANDSCAPE DESIGN FOR BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION AND LANDSCAPE RESILIENCE

Liraz Bistritz; US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station; liraz.bistritz@usda.gov; Patricia N. Manley, Nicholas A. Povak, Michelle A. Day

Amid increasing concerns about wildfires in the West, land managers require tools to evaluate the benefits and consequences of implementing management objectives across diverse landscapes. A common management objective is short-term fire risk reduction, the second one is multiple resource benefits which focuses on longer-term resilience, including the conservation of biodiversity. Using optimization modeling, we evaluated the compatibility of these objectives across 980,000 hectares in the central Sierra Nevada, California, at two levels of accomplishment: 50% and 75% per planning unit. At the 50% level, there was little overlap between the hectares selected for treatment in the fire and the ecosystem scenarios. At the 75% level, areas selected for each scenario overlapped substantially, indicating that tradeoffs would be required. We evaluated the magnitude of benefits gained by these two scenarios using socio-ecological outcomes across 10 pillars of resilience. We witnessed slight increases in species richness following treatment in both the fire and ecosystem scenarios, but greater biodiversity benefits were achieved with the ecosystem scenario. Our findings demonstrate that there is potential for concordance between short-term fire risk mitigation and long-term resilience goals, and that both can be implemented in order to maximize benefits across different aspects of the landscape.

Conference Theme Session - Adaptive Management - I