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

Understanding burn severity is essential to provide an overview of the precursory conditions leading to fires as well as understanding the constraints placed on fire management services when mitigating their effects. Determining the minimum sampling…
Author(s): Alexander W. Holmes, Christoph Rüdiger, Sarah Harris, Nigel J. Tapper
Year Published:

Large wildfires with uncharacteristically high severity are occurring more frequently in western U.S. forests. The increasing size and severity of wildfires has been attributed to both an increase in weather conducive to fire spread and changes to…
Author(s): Brandon M. Collins, Jamie M. Lydersen, Van R. Kane, Nicholas A. Povak, Matthew L. Brooks, Douglas F. Smith
Year Published:

Setting suitable conservation targets is an important part of ecological fire planning. Growth-stage optimisation (GSO) determines the relative proportions of post-fire growth stages (categorical representations of time since fire) that maximise…
Author(s): Matthew Swan, Holly Sitters, Jane G. Cawson, Thomas J. Duff, Yohannes Wibisono, Alan York
Year Published:

With drought across much of the southern and western States, it’s shaping up to be another record year for wildfires. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, May 2018 was the fourthworst May since 2000 in terms of U.S.…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks
Year Published:

Abrupt ecological changes occur rapidly relative to typical rates of ecosystem change and are increasingly observed in ecosystems worldwide, thereby challenging adaptive capacities. Abrupt ecological changes can arise from many processes, only some…
Author(s): Zak Ratjczak, S. R. Carpenter, A. R. Ives, Chris J. Kucharik, T. Ramiadantsoa, A. M. Stegner, J. Williams, J. Zhang, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

Locations within forest fires that remain unburned or burn at low severity—known as fire refugia—are important components of contemporary burn mosaics, but their composition and structure at regional scales are poorly understood. Focusing on recent…
Author(s): Garrett W. Meigs, Meg A. Krawchuk
Year Published:

Fire creates challenges and opportunities for wildlife through rapid destruction, modification and creation of habitat. Fire has spatially variable effects on landscapes; however, for species that benefit from the ephemeral resource patches created…
Author(s): Morgan W. Tingley, Andrew N. Stillman, Robert L. Wilkerson, Christine A. Howell, Sarah C. Sawyer, Rodney B. Siegel
Year Published:

Paleofire research is the study of past fire regimes using a suite of proxies (frequency, area burned, severity, intensity, etc.). Charcoal preserved in sedimentary archives constitutes one of the most ubiquitous measures of past fire regimes along…
Author(s): Julie C. Aleman, Andy Hennebelle, Boris Vannière, Olivier Blarquez, Global Paleofire Working Group
Year Published:

Landsat-based fire severity datasets are an invaluable resource for monitoring and research purposes. These gridded fire severity datasets are generally produced with pre- and post-fire imagery to estimate the degree of fire-induced ecological…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, Lisa M. Holsinger, Morgan A. Voss, Rachel A. Loehman, Nathaniel P. Robinson
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:

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…
Author(s): Sally Archibald, Caroline E. R. Lehmann, Claire M. Belcher, William J. Bond, Ross A. Bradstock, Anne Laure Daniau, K. G. Dexter, Elisabeth J. Forrestel, M. Greve, Tianhua He, Steven I. Higgins, William A. Hoffmann, Byron B. Lamont, D. J. McGlinn, G. R. Moncrieff, Colin P. Osborne, Juli G. Pausas, Owen F. Price, Brad S. Ripley, Brendan M. Rogers, Dylan W. Schwilk, M. F. Simon, Merritt R. Turetsky, Guido R. Van der Werf, Amy E. Zanne
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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…
Author(s): Kristen L. Shive, Scott L. Stephens
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Winslow D. Hansen, Kristin H. Braziunas, Werner Rammer, Rupert Seidl, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Shuang Liang, Matthew D. Hurteau, Anthony L. Westerling
Year Published:

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 ‘…
Author(s): Luke T. Kelly, Lluis Brotons, Katherine M. Giljohann, Michael A. McCarthy, Juli G. Pausas, Annabel L. Smith
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, Marc-Andre Parisien, Lisa M. Holsinger, L. Scott Baggett, Carol Miller
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Michael P. Murray, Joel Siderius
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:

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,…
Author(s): Melanie K. Vanderhoof, Clifton Burt, Todd J. Hawbaker
Year Published: