Fire suppression and climate change have produced disturbance regimes in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA that are increasingly characterized by large, severe fires. Landscape-scale fuel reduction and forest restoration treatments (e.g., thinning and prescribed fire) have the potential to restore more "natural" disturbance regimes to dry forest ecosystems and increase forest ecosystem resilience under climate change. However, treatments that alter forest structure could exacerbate ongoing declines in populations of spotted owls (Strix occidentalis) as well as other old-forest species that inhabit dense, fire-suppressed forests. Potential short-term negative effects of treatments might be outweighed by longer-term benefits if treatments are able to mitigate disturbance-induced habitat loss. However, there are key uncertainties concerning the absolute and relative effects of treatment and severe fire on spotted owl populations. This dissertation seeks to reduce these key uncertainties to facilitate science-based management of dry forest ecosystems and spotted owl populations in the Sierra Nevada. Chapter 1 documents the empirical effect of a large, severe fire (the 2014 King Fire) on a population of spotted owls in the central Sierra Nevada via a natural before-after control-impact experiment. Chapter 2 draws on monitoring data from four long-term spotted owl study areas spanning the latitudinal range of the Sierra Nevada to quantify empirical associations of forest structure (e.g., tree size and canopy cover) on local territory extinction dynamics. The empirical relationships between severe fire, forest structure, and spotted owl occupancy dynamics derived in Chapters 1 and 2 come together in Chapter 3, which projects spotted owl occupancy dynamics as a function of simulated fuel treatment and severe fire occurrence under climate change