A new Oregon State University and US Forest Service study has identified the topographic “fire refugia” that allow northern spotted owl habitat to persist through repeated wildfires, opening a path to forest restoration that no longer pits wildlife protection against fire resilience across the Pacific Northwest. That is according to research published in Forest Ecology & Management and led by Jeremy Rockweit, an Oregon State postdoctoral researcher who spent 17 years monitoring the federally threatened species in California and Oregon before completing his doctorate.
Whilst dry forests across the Pacific Northwest were historically shaped by frequent low-intensity fire that maintained widely spaced trees, a century of fire suppression has allowed dense, closed-canopy stands to expand into upper-slope locations that previously burned more often or at higher severity. The resulting landscape is less resilient to today’s longer, hotter and drier fire seasons, with recent wildfire activity now ranking as the most significant threat to the old-growth forest used by spotted owls for nesting and roosting.
Speaking to the central finding, Rockweit said the maps developed by the research team can guide thinning and prescribed-fire treatments in landscapes that historically burned at low severity without compromising the cover that spotted owls depend on. “Protecting spotted owls and restoring fire-resilient forests don’t have to be competing goals,” Rockweit said.
Building on combined data from spotted owl monitoring that began in the 1980s and fire mapping covering 1985 to 2022 through Oregon State’s Fire Refugia Project, the research team identified sheltered locations near drainage bottoms as the most reliable fire refugia, with nesting and roosting habitat in those positions far more likely to survive repeated burns. Upper-slope and ridgetop forests carrying the same old-growth structure proved least persistent across both the eastern Cascades in Washington and the Klamath region of southwestern Oregon and northwestern California.
Although the modelling held up under moderate fire weather conditions, the study found that both regions can still expect to lose suitable spotted owl nesting and roosting habitat once extreme temperatures and wind speeds drive the fire front. The result sharpens the case for restoration work that builds resilience into ecologically and topographically diverse landscapes rather than retaining as much closed-canopy forest as possible across the wider terrain.
Co-authored with Meg Krawchuk of the Oregon State College of Forestry, David Bell of the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Katie Dugger of the Oregon State College of Agricultural Sciences, and Damon Lesmeister of Oregon State and the Pacific Northwest Research Station, the study now puts mapped fire refugia for the threatened spotted owl into the hands of land managers working across 37 years of accumulated fire data.
For more information: Rockweit, J. T., Krawchuk, M. A., Bell, D. M., Dugger, K. M., & Lesmeister, D. B. (2026). Fostering landscape resilience and species conservation in frequent fire landscapes. Forest Ecology and Management, 585, 123800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2026.123800
