After Two of Colorado's Largest Fires: How Rocky Mountain's Wildlife Is Responding

In 2020, two of Colorado's largest wildfires, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires, burned in Rocky Mountain National Park and the land around it. Fire shapes these forests. What nobody yet knows is what fires of this size and severity mean for the animals that live there.

Bigger, more frequent, more severe

The 2020 fires fit a broader trend of larger, more frequent and more severe wildfires in Rocky Mountain forests and across the western United States. Rising temperatures and drought linked to climate change are predicted to make these conditions worse.

Fire is not simply bad for wildlife

Wildfire promotes biodiversity: for example, it clears accumulated dead organic matter from the soil so new plants can grow. Plants and animals are often adapted to the fire patterns their ecosystem has historically had, so it is the change in how fire behaves that may hurt them. Effects on wildlife have been mixed:

The study

Researchers from Colorado State University and the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station are co-leading a study of several wildfires that burned in Colorado and Wyoming in 2020.

• Where: burned sites and nearby unburned reference sites in Rocky Mountain National Park.
• How: camera traps and acoustic recorders collecting images and sound of bats, birds and ground-dwelling mammals.
• When: May to October in 2024 and 2025.
• What is measured: occupancy — which species use a site, related to factors such as burn severity and vegetation — along with biodiversity and species richness.

Significant differences between burned and unburned sites would show how severe wildfire is affecting wildlife. Resurveying the same places every 5–10 years could track the effects as they unfold, and the results could guide wildlife management and restoration where fires have burned.

Sources

Based on "Assessing Wildlife Responses to Changing Fire Regimes" from the National Park Service (Rocky Mountain National Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on published research including Higuera and others (2021) on Rocky Mountain subalpine forests burning more than at any time in recent millennia.