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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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Fire may remove or create dead wood aboveground, but it is less clear how high severity burning of soils affects belowground microbial communities and soil processes, and for how long. In this study, we investigated soil fungal and bacterial…
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Tree-age data in combination with fire scars improved inverse-distance-weighted spatial modelling of historical fire boundaries and intervals for the Darkwoods, British Columbia, Canada. Fire-scarred trees provided direct evidence of fire. The…
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Like many fire-adapted ecosystems, decades of fire exclusion policy in the Rocky Mountains and Foothills natural regions of southern Alberta, Canada are raising concern over the loss of ecological integrity. Departure from historical conditions is…
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The 2000 Valley Complex wildfire burned in steep montane forests with ash cap soils in western Montana, USA. The effects of high soil burn severity on forest soil hydrologic function were examined using rainfall simulations (100mmh-1 for 1 h) on 0.5…
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Previous research has focused on quantifying fuel loadings and using operational fire behavior models to understand changes in fire severity following MPB outbreaks. In this study however, researchers used direct field measurements taken from the…
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Wildfires shape the distribution and structure of vegetation across the inland northwestern United States. However, fire activity is expected to increase given the current rate of climate change, with uncertain outcomes. A fire impact that has not…
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Understanding the causes and consequences of rapid environmental change is an essential scientific frontier, particularly given the threat of climate- and land use-induced changes in disturbance regimes. In western North America, recent widespread…
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In heterogeneous forest landscapes prone to wildfires, accurate classification of the fire regime beyond direct observations and records is difficult. This is in part due to the methods used to reconstruct historical fires in complex, heterogeneous…
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Increasing rates of natural disturbances under a warming climate raise important questions about how multiple disturbances interact. Escalating wildfire activity in recent decades has resulted in some forests re-burning in short succession, but how…
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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…
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Climate science and understanding how climate change may affect the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) have come a long way since our 1992 Yellowstone Science article (Romme and Turner 1992, based on Romme and Turner 1991). In…
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The risk of bark beetle outbreaks is widely predicted to increase because of a warming climate that accelerates temperature-driven beetle population growth and drought stress that impairs host tree defenses. However, few if any studies have…
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The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) was established over 20 years ago as an experiment in large landscape conservation. Initially, Y2Y emerged as a response to large scale habitat fragmentation by advancing ecological connectivity…
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Both satellite imagery and spatial fire effects models are valuable tools for generating burn severity maps that are useful to fire scientists and resource managers. The purpose of this study was to test a new mapping approach that integrates…
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The ecological effects of forest fires burning with high severity are long-lived and have the greatest impact on vegetation successional trajectories, as compared to low-to-moderate severity fires. The primary drivers of high severity fire are…
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Widespread tree mortality caused by outbreaks of native bark beetles (Circulionidae: Scolytinae) in recent decades has raised concern among scientists and forest managers about whether beetle outbreaks fuel more ecologically severe forest fires and…
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Wildland fire is an important natural process in many ecosystems. However, fire exclusion has reduced frequency of fire and area burned in many dry forest types, which may affect vegetation structure and composition, and potential fire behavior. In…
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Freshwater ecosystems are warming globally from the direct effects of climate change on air temperature and hydrology and the indirect effects on near-stream vegetation. In fire-prone landscapes, vegetative change may be especially rapid and cause…
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The degree to which recent bark beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreaks may influence fire severity and postfire tree regeneration is of heightened interest to resource managers throughout western North America, but empirical data on actual fire…
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