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Determining whether forest landscapes can maintain their resilience to fire – that is, their ability to rebound and sustain – given rapid climate change and increasing fire activity is a pressing challenge throughout the American West. Many western…
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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…
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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…
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For millennia, wildfires have markedly influenced forests and non-forested landscapes of the western United States (US), and they are increasingly seen as having substantial impacts on society and nature. There is growing concern over what kinds and…
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Climate change is expected to result in substantial ecological impacts across the globe. These impacts are uncertain but there is strong consensus that they will almost certainly affect fire regimes and vegetation. In this study, we evaluated how…
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Wildland fire is a disturbance that can profoundly impact the environment and human health and welfare. While climate is generally a critical driving factor shaping the occurrence and impacts of fire, fire can also play a role in shaping climate.…
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Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental…
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Fire regime characteristics in North America are expected to change over the next several decades as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Although some fire regime characteristics (e.g., area burned and fire season length) are relatively well-…
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The purpose of this report is to provide a summary of findings and products from our FY2014 research project on fire refugia. We summarize the products and findings of our work, including: development of regional datasets; use of a climate space…
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We studied the effects of a shift in the fire regime of an ecosystem that is very sensitive to climate change: the ecotone from closed forest to open alpine tundra, hereafter the alpine treeline ecotone (ATE). Results suggest that ATEs will become…
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Aim: Studies of fire activity along environmental gradients have been undertaken, but the results of such studies have yet to be integrated with fire-regime analysis. We characterize fire-regime components along climate gradients and a gradient of…
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Numerous theoretical and empirical studies have shown that wildfire activity (e.g., area burned) at regional to global scales may be limited at the extremes of environmental gradients such as productivity or moisture. Fire activity, however,…
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Wildfire in western U.S. federally managed forests has increased substantially in recent decades, with large (>1000 acre) fires in the decade through 2012 over five times as frequent (450 percent increase) and burned area over ten times as great…
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Forests and woodlands in the central Rocky Mountains span broad gradients in climate, elevation, and other environmental conditions, and therefore encompass a great diversity of species, ecosystem productivities, and fire regimes. The objectives of…
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This report synthesizes available fire history and climate change scientific knowledge to aid managers with fire decisions in the face of ongoing 21st Century climate change. Fire history and climate change (FHCC) have been ongoing for over 400…
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Climate change effects on wildfire occurrence have been attributed primarily to increases in temperatures causing earlier snowpack ablation and longer fire seasons. Variability in precipitation is also an important control on snowpack accumulation…
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Climate change is likely to alter wildfire regimes, but the magnitude and timing of potential climate-driven changes in regional fire regimes are not well understood. We considered how the occurrence, size, and spatial location of large fires might…
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Fire is an important part of the disturbance regimes of northwestern US forests and its role in maintaining and altering forest vegetation is evident in the paleoecological record of the region. Long-term reconstructions of Holocene fire regimes,…
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