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Roughly 3% of the Earth's land surface burns annually, representing a critical exchange of energy and matter between the land and atmosphere via combustion. Fires range from slow smouldering peat fires, to low-intensity surface fires, to intense…
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When disturbances recur at rates shorter than an ecosystems rate of recovery, it has the potential to result in significant changes to ecosystem structure and function. In western US forests, wildfire activity has increased and many severely burned…
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Environmental change is accelerating in the 21st century, but how multiple drivers may interact to alter forest resilience remains uncertain. In forests affected by large high-severity disturbances, tree regeneration is a resilience linchpin that…
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Changing climate and increasing area burned pose a challenge to forest carbon (C) storage, which is compounded by an elevated risk of high‐severity wildfire due to long‐term fire suppression in the western US. Restoration treatments that reduce tree…
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Conserving animals and plants in fire-prone landscapes requires evidence of how fires affect modified ecosystems. Despite progress on this front, fire ecology is restricted by a dissonance between two dominant paradigms: ‘fire mosaics’ and ‘…
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In many forested ecosystems, it is increasingly recognized that the probability of burning is substantially reduced within the footprint of previously burned areas. This self-limiting effect of wildland fire is considered a fundamental emergent…
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Historic frequency and severity of fire in whitebark pine forests of the Cascade Mountain Range, USA
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) is a foundation species of high elevation forest ecosystems in the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. We examined fire evidence on 55 fire history sites located in the…
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Persistent fire refugia, which are forest stands that have survived multiple fires, play an important ecological role in the resilience of mountainous forest ecosystems following disturbances. The loss of numerous refugia patches to large, high-…
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Interpretations of post-fire condition and rates of vegetation recovery can influence management priorities, actions and perception of latent risks from landslides and floods. In this study, we used the Waldo Canyon fire (2012, Colorado Springs,…
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Factors affecting wildland-fire size distribution include weather, fuels, and fire suppression activities. We present a novel application of survival analysis to quantify the effects of these factors on a sample of sizes of lightning-caused fires…
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Knowledge of historical forest conditions and disturbance regimes improves our understanding of landscape dynamics and provides a frame of reference for evaluating modern patterns, processes, and their interactions. In the western United States,…
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Context: In the interior Northwest, debate over restoring mixed-conifer forests after a century of fire exclusion is hampered by poor understanding of the pattern and causes of spatial variation in historical fire regimes. Objectives: To identify…
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As climate change alters global fire regimes, fire and forest managers must prioritize management actions that simultaneously protect sensitive resources and allow fire to maintain its ecological role. Over the last twenty years, this task has…
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Most ecotones include structural and taxonomic elements from both adjacent communities, but it remains unclear how these elements function and interact within ecotones. We investigated long‐term plant community responses to wildfire in a 7000‐km2…
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This research investigates the impact of wildfires on watershed flow regimes, specifically focusing on evaluation of fire events within specified hydroclimatic regions in the western United States, and evaluating the impact of climate and…
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Alpine treelines are expected to move upward in a warming climate, but downward in response to increases in wildfire. We studied the effects of fire on vegetation structure and composition across four alpine treeline ecotones extending from Abies…
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Shifting disturbance regimes can have cascading effects on many ecosystems processes. This is particularly true when the scale of the disturbance no longer matches the regeneration strategy of the dominant vegetation. In the yellow pine and mixed…
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For millennia, wildfires have markedly influenced forests and non-forested landscapes of the western United States (US), and they are increasingly seen as having substantial impacts on society and nature. There is growing concern over what kinds and…
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High severity fire: evaluating its key drivers and mapping its probability across western US forests
Wildland fire is a critical process in forests of the western United States (US). Variation in fire behavior, which is heavily influenced by fuel loading, terrain, weather, and vegetation type, leads to heterogeneity in fire severity across…
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Reconstructing historical fire regimes is difficult at the landscape scale, but essential to determine whether modern fires are unnaturally severe. I synthesized evidence across 725,000 ha of montane forests in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, from…
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