Bradly J. Boner | Photography

Forest fire invertebrate impact study

A captured chipmunk is implanted with a small device that, with the wave of a wand, will tell researchers that it had been trapped previously should it be captured again throughout the summer. The rate at which small mammals like deer mice and voles are recaptured in the study help scientists model their population size. They can even learn how they’re moving around the landscape by dusting the mice with fluorescent powder and following their trails with black light. Researchers thought they’d hide under logs but instead, they used them as a “highway to get through the forest,” Roehrs said. Other discoveries also surprised the scientists, like finding a jumping mouse that had survived in, or next to, the 2016 fire. “It’s so easy to think of everything as being burned and being set back to zero. It’s not like that at all. It’s a very dynamic process.”

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A captured chipmunk is implanted with a small device that, with the wave of a wand, will tell researchers that it had been trapped previously should it be captured again throughout the summer. The rate at which small mammals like deer mice and voles are recaptured in the study help scientists model their population size. They can even learn how they’re moving around the landscape by dusting the mice with fluorescent powder and following their trails with black light. Researchers thought they’d hide under logs but instead, they used them as a “highway to get through the forest,” Roehrs said. Other discoveries also surprised the scientists, like finding a jumping mouse that had survived in, or next to, the 2016 fire. “It’s so easy to think of everything as being burned and being set back to zero. It’s not like that at all. It’s a very dynamic process.”