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Standing dead tree stems (snags) become abundant following disturbances like bark beetle outbreaks and stand-replacing fire. Snags are an important element of wildlife habitat, and when they eventually fall can injure or damage people and…
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In fire-prone forests, postfire tree recovery may be limited by climate conditions and fire activity that exceed the range of conditions under which these forests evolved, leading to major shifts in forest structure and composition. Transformations…
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Changing disturbance regimes and climate can overcome forest ecosystem resilience. Following high-severity fire, forest recovery may be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier postfire climate, or short-interval reburning. A…
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We used a chronosequence approach to investigate the relationship between existing conditions of forested land that burned at some point between 1984 and 2014 in western Montana and the abundances of various bird species based on 7533 point-counts.…
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Executive summary: Wildfires are a fact of life for westerners. They mark the beginning of the spring season and have been a keystone architect of biodiverse ecosystems for millennia. While wildfires are not eco-catastrophes, they are a health…
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We collected field and remotely sensed data spanning 10 years after three 2003 Montana wildfires to monitor ecological change across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis was used to create post-fire maps…
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Avian relationships with wildfire at two dry forest locations with different historical fire regimes
Wildfire is a key factor influencing bird community composition in western North American forests. We need to understand species and community responses to wildfire and how responses vary regionally to effectively manage dry conifer forests for…
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We use the historical presence of high-severity fire patches in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States to make several points that we hope will encourage development of a more ecologically informed view of severe wildland fire effects.…
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As the size and extent of wildfires has increased in recent decades, so has the cost and extent of post-fire management, including seeding and salvage logging. However, we know little about how burn severity, salvage logging, and post-fire seeding…
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In this chapter in the book "The Ecological Importance of Mixed Severity Fires: Nature's Phoenix, the authors do not provide an encyclopedic review of the more than 450 published papers that describe some kind of effect of fire on birds. Instead,…
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Following the 2005 School Fire which burned ~ 50,000 acres across forest and grasslands, managers were particularly concerned with treating severely burned areas to mitigate weed spread and to limit soil erosion. Various mulching treatments (wheat…
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Context: An increase in the incidence of large wildfires worldwide has prompted concerns about the resilience of forest ecosystems, particularly in the western U.S., where recent changes are linked with climate warming and 20th-century land…
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There is widespread concern that fire exclusion has led to an unprecedented threat of uncharacteristically severe fires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex. Laws) and mixed-conifer forests of western North America. These extensive montane…
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Dr. Dick Hutto, professor of Organismal Biology and Ecology at the University of Montana, took participants of the May 2014 Large Wildland Fires Conference to recently burned sites to discuss fire effects. Hutto was enthused and excited about “the…
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Aim: Wildfire is often considered more severe now than historically in dry forests of the western United States. Tree-ring reconstructions, which suggest that historical dry forests were park-like with large, old trees maintained by low-severity…
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Wildfire effects upon riparian plant community structure, composition, and distribution may strongly influence the dynamic relationships between riparian vegetation and stream ecosystems. However, few studies have examined the influence of fire on…
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During the 2012 fire season from June through August, wildfires in the droughtstricken western and central United States burned more than 3.6 million acres of forest and shrubland. In the hot, dry, windy conditions seen that season, a single spark…
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In the Northern Rockies, forests that have escaped fire are rare. In the Crown, fire is just as important as rainfall and sunlight are to plants and animals. For the vast majority of forest types within the region, the predominant fire regime is one…
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Influence of wildfire severity on riparian plant community heterogeneity in an Idaho, USA wilderness
Despite the increasing recognition of riparian zones as important ecotones that link terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and of fire as a critical natural disturbance, much remains unknown regarding the influence of fire on stream-riparian ecosystems…
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Several recent papers have suggested replacing the terminology of fire intensity and fire severity. Part of the problem with fire intensity is that it is sometimes used incorrectly to describe fire effects, when in fact it is justifiably restricted…
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