Fire played an important role in maintaining and creating conditions suitable for native flora and fauna in the forests of western North America. Recent coarse filter conservation strategies have advocated creating future landscapes that incorporate historic or natural ranges of variability, including fire regimes. Historic fire regimes were variable across the West, and created quite unique coarse woody debris dynamics in low-, mixed-, and high-severity fire regimes. Moving towards more historic landscape structures will require variable standards for coarse woody debris retention.