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Increasing wildfire activity in forests worldwide has driven urgency in understanding current and future fire regimes. Spatial patterns of area burned at high severity strongly shape forest resilience and constitute a key dimension of fire regimes,…
Author(s): Michele S. Buonanduci, Daniel C. Donato, Joshua S. Halofsky, Maureen C. Kennedy, Brian J. Harvey
Year Published:

Across western North America, fire regimes (i.e., the frequency, extent, and severity of fire events) are changing in response to warming climate. Regions in which fire regimes are driven by top-down controls (e.g., climate, fire weather) are likely…
Author(s): Michele S. Buonanduci, Brian J. Harvey
Year Published:

Invasive grass species can alter fire regimes, converting native terrestrial ecosystems into non-native, grass-dominated landscapes, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing fire activity and flammable grass expansion. Analyses of this…
Author(s): Emily J. Fusco, Jennifer Balch, Adam L. Mahood, R. Chelsea Nagy, Alexandra D. Syphard, Bethany A. Bradley
Year Published:

With an increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires across the globe and resultant changes to long-established fire regimes, the mapping of fire severity is a vital part of monitoring ecosystem resilience and recovery. The emergence of…
Author(s): Samuel Hillman, Bryan Hally, Luke Wallace, Darren Turner, Arko Lucieer, Karin J. Reinke, Simon D. Jones
Year Published:

Background: A fire management strategy of deliberate patch-mosaic burning (PMB) is postulated to promote biodiversity by providing a range of habitat patches with different fire histories, habitat qualities, and vegetation ages at a given scale. We…
Author(s): Allan J. Wills, Graeme Liddelow, Verna Tunsell
Year Published:

Increases in burned area across the western US since the mid‐1980’s have been widely documented and linked partially to climate factors, yet evaluations of trends in fire severity are lacking. Here, we evaluate fire severity trends and their…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Land surface phenology (LSP) characterizes the timing and greenness of seasonal vegetation growth in satellite pixels and it has been widely used to associate with climate change. However, wildfire, causing considerable land surface changes, exerts…
Author(s): Jianmin Wang, Xiaoyang Zhang
Year Published:

The extent of the Earth’s surface burned annually by fires is affected by a number of drivers, including but not limited to climate. Other important drivers include the amount and type of vegetation (fuel) available and human impacts, including fire…
Author(s): Karen L. Riley, A. Park Williams, Shawn P. Urbanski, David E. Calkin, Karen C. Short, Christopher D. O'Connor
Year Published:

Background: Forest management, especially restoration, is informed by understanding the dominant natural disturbance regime. In many western North American forests, the keystone disturbance is fire, and a plethora of research exists characterizing…
Author(s): Shawn T. McKinney
Year Published:

Wildfires in forest ecosystems produce landscape mosaics that include relatively unaffected areas, termed fire refugia. These patches of persistent forest cover can support fire-sensitive species and the biotic legacies important for post-fire…
Author(s): Ryan B. Walker, Jonathan D. Coop, William M. Downing, Meg A. Krawchuk, Sparkle L. Malone, Garrett W. Meigs
Year Published:

Recently, the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: a Second Notice was issued in response to ongoing and largely unabated environmental degradation due to anthropogenic activities. In the warning, humanity is urged to practice more environmentally…
Author(s): Sean C. P. Coogan, Francois-Nicolas Robinne, Piyush Jain, Michael D. Flannigan
Year Published:

The persistence of wildlife species in fire‐prone ecosystems is under increasing pressure from global change, including alterations in fire regimes caused by climate change. However, unburned islands might act to mitigate negative effects of fire on…
Author(s): Jasper Steenvoorden, Arjan J. H. Meddens, Anthony Martinez, Lee J. Foster, W. Daniel Kissling
Year Published:

More than 70 years of fire suppression by federal land management agencies has interrupted fire regimes in much of the western United States. The result of missed fire cycles is a buildup of both surface and canopy fuels in many forest ecosystems,…
Author(s): Alisa Keyser, Anthony L. Westerling
Year Published:

Vegetation fires are an important process in the Earth system. Fire intensity locally impacts fuel consumption, damage to the vegetation, chemical composition of fire emissions and also how fires spread across landscapes. It has been observed that…
Author(s): Pierre Laurent, Florent Mouillot, María Vanesa Moreno, Chao Yue, Philippe Ciais
Year Published:

Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales,…
Author(s): Arjan J. H. Meddens, Crystal A. Kolden, James A. Lutz, Alistair M. S. Smith, C. Alina Cansler, John T. Abatzoglou, Garrett W. Meigs, William M. Downing, Meg A. Krawchuk
Year Published:

An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western USA remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway.…
Author(s): William L. Baker, Mark A. Williams
Year Published:

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-…
Author(s): Marie-Pierre Rogeau, Quinn E. Barber, Marc-Andre Parisien
Year Published:

Natural resource managers need to know how past wildfires influence the severity and ecological effects of subsequent wildfires fires in order to make informed decisions during and after wildfire events, and to effectively plan for the future. The…
Author(s): Andrew J. Larson, R. Travis Belote
Year Published:

Post-fire tree mortality models are vital tools used by forest land managers to predict fire effects, estimate delayed mortality and develop management prescriptions. We evaluated the performance of mortality models within the First Order Fire…
Author(s): Tucker J. Furniss, Andrew J. Larson, Van R. Kane, James A. Lutz
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Kristen L. Shive, Haiganoush K. Preisler, Kevin R. Welch, Hugh Safford, Ramona J. Butz, Kevin L. O'Hara, Scott L. Stephens
Year Published: