Multi-trophic occupancy modeling connects temporal dynamics of woodpeckers and beetle sign following fire

In conifer forests of western North America, wildlife populations can change rapidly in the decade following wildfire as trees die and animals respond to concomitant resource pulses that occur across multiple trophic levels. In particular, black-backed woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus) show predictable temporal increases then declines following fire; this trajectory is widely believed to be a response to the woodpeckers’ main prey, woodboring beetle larvae of the families Buprestidae and Cerambycidae, but we lack understanding of how abundances of these predators and prey may be associated in time or space. Here, we pair woodpecker surveys over 10 years with surveys of woodboring beetle sign and activity, collected at 128 survey plots across 22 recent fires, to ask whether accumulated beetle sign indicates current or past black-backed woodpecker occurrence, and whether that relationship is mediated by the number of years since fire. We test this relationship using an integrative multi-trophic occupancy model. Our results demonstrate that woodboring beetle sign is a positive indicator of woodpecker presence 1–3 years following fire, an uninformative indicator from 4–6 years after fire, and a negative indicator beginning 7 years following fire. Woodboring beetle activity, itself, is temporally variable and dependent on tree species composition, with beetle sign generally accumulating over time, particularly in stands with diverse tree communities, but decreasing over time in Pinus-dominated stands where faster bark decay rates lead to brief pulses of beetle activity followed by rapid degradation of tree substrate and accumulated beetle sign. Altogether, the strong connections of woodpecker occurrence to beetle activity support prior hypotheses of how multi-trophic interactions govern rapid temporal dynamics of primary and secondary consumers in burned forests. While our results indicate that beetle sign is, at best, a rapidly shifting and potentially misleading measure of woodpecker occurrence, the better we understand the interacting mechanisms underlying temporally dynamic systems, the more successfully we will be able to predict the outcomes of management actions.