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Author(s):
Monica G. Turner, William H. Romme, Daniel B. Tinker, Daniel C. Donato, Brian J. Harvey
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Ecology
Successional Changes
Fire Effects
Ecological - First Order
Ecological - Second Order
Vegetation
Fire Regime
Fire Intensity / Burn Severity
Recovery after fire
Resilience
Ecosystem(s):
Subalpine dry spruce-fir forest, Aspen woodland

NRFSN number: 13720
FRAMES RCS number: 21908
Record updated:

Understanding the rates, trajectories, and spatial variability in succession following severe wildfire is increasingly important for forest managers in western North America and critical for anticipating the resilience or vulnerability of forested landscapes to changing environmental conditions. However, few long-term studies have considered succession following severe, stand-replacing wildfires over large areas. This research focused on succession after the 1988 Yellowstone fires and tested hypotheses within three overarching questions: (1) Are stand structure and function beginning to converge twenty-five years after the Yellowstone Fires, and what mechanisms may contribute to convergence or divergence? (2) Are plant community composition and species richness converging or diverging across gradients in local fire severity, postfire lodgepole pine density, elevation and soil type a quarter-century after the 1988 fires? (3) How do canopy and surface fuels vary across the postfire landscape, and how will the variation in fuels influence potential fire behavior a quarter century postfire? Twenty-five years after the 1988 fires, we resampled permanent plots in lodgepole-pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) forests in Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming, USA) that burned in the 1988 fires and were distributed widely across the landscape.

Citation

Turner, M.G.; Romme, W.H.; Tinker, D.B.; Donato, D.C.; Harvey, B.J. 2015. Paths of recovery: landscape variability in forest structure, function, and fuels after the 1988 Yellowstone Fires. Final Report to the Joint Fire Science Program. JFSP Project No. 11-1-1-7. University of Wisconsin - Madison. 30 p.