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Cool‐water habitats provide increasingly vital refuges for cold‐water fish living on the margins of their historical ranges; consequently, efforts to enhance or create cool‐water habitat are becoming a major focus of river restoration practices. However, the effectiveness of restoration projects for providing thermal refuge and creating diverse temperature regimes at the watershed scale remains unclear. In the Klamath River in northern California, the Karuk Tribe Fisheries Program, the Mid‐Klamath Watershed Council, and the U.S. Forest Service constructed a series of off‐channel ponds that recreate floodplain habitat and support juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and steelhead (O. mykiss) along the Klamath River and its tributaries. We instrumented these ponds and applied multivariate autoregressive time series models of fine‐scale temperature data from ponds, tributaries, and the mainstem Klamath River to assess how off‐channel ponds contributed to thermal regime diversity and thermal refuge habitat in the Klamath riverscape. Our analysis demonstrated that ponds provide diverse thermal habitats that are significantly cooler than creek or mainstem river habitats, even during severe drought. Wavelet analysis of long‐term (10 years) temperature data indicated that thermal buffering (i.e. dampening of diel variation) increased over time but was disrupted by drought conditions in 2021. Our analysis demonstrates that in certain situations, human‐made off‐channel ponds can increase thermal diversity in modified riverscapes even during drought conditions, potentially benefiting floodplain‐dependent cold‐water species. Restoration actions that create and maintain thermal regime diversity and thermal refuges will become an essential tool to conserve biodiversity in climate‐sensitive watersheds. 

Data that influence policy and major investment decisions risk entrenching social and political inequities 

Human activity and land use change impact every landscape on Earth, driving declines in many animal species while benefiting others. Species ecological and life history traits may predict success in human-dominated landscapes such that only species with “winning” combinations of traits will persist in disturbed environments. However, this link between species traits and successful coexistence with humans remains obscured by the complexity of anthropogenic disturbances and variability among study systems. We compiled detection data for 24 mammal species from 61 populations across North America to quantify the effects of (1) the direct presence of people and (2) the human footprint (landscape modification) on mammal occurrence and activity levels. Thirty-three percent of mammal species exhibited a net negative response (i.e., reduced occurrence or activity) to increasing human presence and/or footprint across populations, whereas 58% of species were positively associated with increasing disturbance. However, apparent benefits of human presence and footprint tended to decrease or disappear at higher disturbance levels, indicative of thresholds in mammal species’ capacity to tolerate disturbance or exploit human-dominated landscapes. Species ecological and life history traits were strong predictors of their responses to human footprint, with increasing footprint favoring smaller, less carnivorous, faster-reproducing species. The positive and negative effects of human presence were distributed more randomly with respect to species trait values, with apparent winners and losers across a range of body sizes and dietary guilds. Differential responses by some species to human presence and human footprint highlight the importance of considering these two forms of human disturbance separately when estimating anthropogenic impacts on wildlife. Our approach provides insights into the complex mechanisms through which human activities shape mammal communities globally, revealing the drivers of the loss of larger predators in human-modified landscapes.