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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:

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:

Climate change is expected to cause widespread shifts in the distribution and abundance of plant species through direct impacts on mortality, regeneration, and survival. At landscape scales, climate impacts will be strongly mediated by disturbances…
Author(s): Kerry Kemp, Philip E. Higuera, Penelope Morgan, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Wildfires cause substantial environmental and socioeconomic impacts and threaten many Spanish forested landscapes. We describe how LiDAR-derived canopy fuel characteristics and spatial fire simulation can be integrated with stand metrics to derive…
Author(s): Jeremy Arkin, Nicholas C. Coops, Txomin Hermosilla, Lori D. Daniels, Andrew Plowright
Year Published:

Fire regimes are now recognized as the product of social processes whereby fire on any landscape is the product of human-generated drivers: climate change, historical patterns of vegetation manipulation, invasive species, active fire suppression,…
Author(s): Robert M. Scheller, Alec Kretchun, Todd J. Hawbaker, Paul D. Henne
Year Published:

Wildfires have increased in frequency, duration, and intensity worldwide. Climate change, drought, and other factors have not only increased susceptibility to wildfires, but have also increased the duration of the season. There are a number of…
Author(s): Setrige W. Crawford, Kamran Eftekhari Shahroudi
Year Published:

Background: Few studies have examined post-fire vegetation recovery in temperate forest ecosystems with Landsat time series analysis. We analyzed time series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) derived from LandTrendr spectral-temporal segmentation…
Author(s): Benjamin C. Bright, Andrew T. Hudak, Robert E. Kennedy, Justin D. Braaten, Azad Henareh Khalyani
Year Published:

Wildfires are a natural part of most forest ecosystems, but due to changing climatic and environmental conditions, they have become larger, more severe, and potentially more damaging. Forested watersheds vulnerable to wildfire serve as drinking…
Author(s): Amanda K. Hohner, Charles C. Rhoades, Paul Wilkerson, Fernando L. Rosario-Ortiz
Year Published:

Fire-prone invasive grasses create novel ecosystem threats by increasing fine-fuel loads and continuity, which can alter fire regimes. While the existence of an invasive grass-fire cycle is well known, evidence of altered fire regimes is typically…
Author(s): Emily J. Fusco, John T. Finn, Jennifer Balch, R. Chelsea Nagy, Bethany A. Bradley
Year Published:

Climate change is increasing fire activity in the western United States, which has the potential to accelerate climate-induced shifts in vegetation communities. Wildfire can catalyze vegetation change by killing adult trees that could otherwise…
Author(s): Kimberley T. Davis, Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Philip E. Higuera, Zachary A. Holden, Thomas T. Veblen, Monica T. Rother, Sean A. Parks, Anna Sala, Marco Maneta
Year Published:

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of burn severity on soil properties (chemical, biochemical and microbiological) in fire-prone pine ecosystems three years after fire. To achieve these goals, we selected two large wildfires that…
Author(s): Víctor Fernández-García, Jessica R. Miesel, Manuel Jaime Baeza, Elena Marcos, Leonor Calvo
Year Published:

Forests store a large amount of terrestrial carbon, but this storage capacity is vulnerable to wildfire. Combustion, and subsequent tree mortality and soil erosion, can lead to increased carbon release and decreased carbon uptake. Previous work has…
Author(s): Kristina J. Bartowitz, Philip E. Higuera, Bryan N. Shuman, Kendra K. McLauchlan, Tara W. Hudiburg
Year Published:

As forest fire activity increases worldwide, it is important to track changing patterns of burn severity (i.e., degree of fire‐caused ecological change). Satellite data provide critical information across space and time, yet how satellite indices…
Author(s): Brian J. Harvey, Robert A. Andrus, Sean C. Anderson
Year Published:

This synthesis summarizes information available in the scientific literature on historical patterns and contemporary changes in fuels and fire regimes in juniper communities of the Columbia and northern Great basins. Limited evidence suggests that…
Author(s): Shannon K. Murphy, Janet L. Fryer
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:

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:

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…
Author(s): C. Alina Cansler, Donald McKenzie, Charles B. Halpern
Year Published:

Extensive high‐severity wildfires have driven major losses of ponderosa pine and mixed‐conifer forests in the southwestern United States, in some settings catalyzing enduring conversions to non‐forested vegetation types. Management interventions to…
Author(s): Ryan B. Walker, Jonathan D. Coop, Sean A. Parks, Laura Trader
Year Published:

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,…
Author(s): R. Keala Hagmann, Jens T. Stevens, Jamie M. Lydersen, Brandon M. Collins, John J. Battles, Paul F. Hessburg, Carrie R. Levine, Andrew G. Merschel, Scott L. Stephens, Alan H. Taylor, Jerry F. Franklin, Debora L. Johnson, K. Norman Johnson
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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…
Author(s): Andrew G. Merschel, Emily K. Heyerdahl, Thomas A. Spies, Rachel A. Loehman
Year Published: