protected property and on surrounding unprotected lands.  Important dispersal corridors between populations have between identified and opportunities to enhance them explored.  Conservation of these population fragments has become part of the solution for the long-term persistence of the metapopulation.

DIRECT FIRE EFFECTS OF ANIMALS:

High-intensity fire is necessary to maintain scrub habitat suitable for Florida scrub-jays, but scrub, paradoxically, is not particularly flammable, nor easily ignited [2].  Fires that burn scrub usually ignite in surrounding, more flammable habitat, and spread into scrub when burning conditions are severe.  Consequently, scrub fires are typically patchy, burning out areas close to ignition sites but leaving surrounding scrub unburned.  Scale of patches is such that few Florida scrub-jay territories burn completely, so jays can readily avoid fire and seldom need to relocate [1]. 

HABITAT RELATED FIRE EFFECTS:

Fire is essential to the health of scrub ecosystems.  Scrub is a pyrogenic ecosystem, its flora and fauna adapted to recurrent, high-intensity fire.  Such fires maintain habitat structure and species composition.  Healthy scrub can re-establish itself quickly after burning.  Sprouting species such as oaks (Quercus spp.) and palmettos (Serenoa repens) regenerate rapidly after being burned to the ground.  Other species, most notably Florida rosemary (Ceratiola ericoides), regenerate from seed stored in the soil, or as in the case of sand pine, from fire induced seed release.  Long periods without fire lead to a forest habitat structure, with closed canopy and few open, sand patches, and an altered species composition.   

It may prove difficult to re-establish healthy scrub habitat where fire has long been suppressed.  Most scrub oaks can grow to tree size if long unburned, creating serious management problems.  Among them: accumulation of high fuel loads that makes prescribed burning difficult and the risk of catastrophic wildfire high; inability of fire to kill large above-ground stems; loss of obligate seeding species such as Florida Rosemary with limited adult life spans; and altered habitat conditions that will no longer support species dependant on shrub habitat structure [3].  Mechanical clearing can resolve some, but not all, these problems, and may even introduce new ones.  Soil disturbance can hinder or preclude sprouting of native species and facilitate the establishment of weedy or invasive species.  Brazilian pepper (Shinus terebinthifolius), for example, quickly invades coastal strand/scrub where mechanical clearing has disturbed the soil.

FIRE USE:

Periodic, intense fire is the only practical way to maintain scrub landscapes in optimal condition.  Prescribed fire is the principal tool for doing so.  The fire frequency needed to maintain optimal scrub habitat for Florida scrub-jays should be based on site-specific scrub habitat characteristics [10].  Variation in on-site soil, water, scrub composition, fire intensity, and fire history make it difficult to assign an exact frequency with which scrub should be burned, but a range of 2-10 years is a reasonable guideline.  Scrub higher than about 7 feet is unsuitable for sustaining jay populations, and should be burned.  Burns where Florida scrub-jay densities are high should be designed to increase spatial and temporal heterogeneity across scrub landscapes, reducing the chance that