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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15

We have constructed a fire weather climatology over North America from 1979 to 2015 using the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System. We tested for the presence of trends in potential fire season…
Author(s): Piyush Jain, Xianli Wang, Michael D. Flannigan
Year Published:

Time-varying fire-climate relationships may represent an important component of fire-regime variability, relevant for understanding the controls of fire and projecting fire activity under global-change scenarios. We used time-varying statistical…
Author(s): Philip E. Higuera, John T. Abatzoglou, Jeremy S. Littell, Penelope Morgan
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Anthony L. Westerling, Timothy J. Brown, Tania L. Schoennagel, Thomas W. Swetnam, Monica G. Turner, Thomas T. Veblen
Year Published:

Seasonal changes in the climatic potential for very large wildfires (VLWF > or = 50,000 ac ~20,234 ha) across the western contiguous United States are projected over the 21st century using generalized linear models and downscaled climate…
Author(s): E. Natasha Stavros, John T. Abatzoglou, Donald McKenzie, Narasimhan K. Larkin
Year Published:

Fire will play an important role in shaping forest and stream ecosystems as the climate changes. Historic observations show increased dryness accompanying more widespread fire and forest die-off. These events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems…
Author(s): Charles H. Luce, Penelope Morgan, Kathleen A. Dwire, Daniel J. Isaak, Zachary A. Holden, Bruce E. Rieman
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): William T. Sommers, Stanley G. Coloff, Susan G. Conard
Year Published:

The purpose of this paper is to quantify climatic controls on the area burned by fire in different vegetation types in the western United States. We demonstrate that wildfire area burned (WFAB) in the American West was controlled by climate during…
Author(s): Jeremy S. Littell, Donald McKenzie, David L. Peterson, Anthony L. Westerling
Year Published:

The Northern Rocky Mountains have sustained wildfire for centuries. Fires are widespread throughout the region during certain years, most recently in 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2007. However, until very recently there was little understanding of whether…
Author(s): Rachel Clark
Year Published:

Quantifying the historical range and variability of landscape composition and structure using simulation modeling is becoming an important means of assessing current landscape condition and prioritizing landscapes for ecosystem restoration. However…
Author(s): Robert E. Keane, Lisa M. Holsinger, Russell A. Parsons, Kathy L. Gray
Year Published:

We inferred climate drivers of regionally synchronous surface fires from 1651 to 1900 at 15 sites with existing annually accurate fire-scar chronologies from forests dominated by ponderosa pine or Douglas-fir in the inland Northwest (interior Oregon…
Author(s): Emily K. Heyerdahl, Donald McKenzie, Lori D. Daniels, Amy E. Hessl, Jeremy S. Littell, Nathan J. Mantua
Year Published:

Our objective was to infer the climate drivers of regionally synchronous fire years in dry forests of the U.S. northern Rockies in Idaho and western Montana. During our analysis period (1650-1900), we reconstructed fires from 9245 fire scars on 576…
Author(s): Emily K. Heyerdahl, Penelope Morgan, James P. Riser
Year Published:

We inferred climate drivers of 20th-century years with regionally synchronous forest fires in the U.S. northern Rockies. We derived annual fire extent from an existing fire atlas that includes 5,038 fire polygons recorded from 12,070,086 ha, or 71%…
Author(s): Penelope Morgan, Emily K. Heyerdahl, Carly E. Gibson
Year Published:

Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, but surprisingly, the extent of recent changes has never been systematically documented. Nor has it been established to what degree climate may be…
Author(s): Anthony L. Westerling, Hugo G. Hidalgo, Daniel R. Cayan, Thomas W. Swetnam
Year Published:

This 3-year research project is identifying the climate drivers of regional fire and fuel dynamics in the Northern Rockies in the past, present, and future. We are identifying regional fire years from two sources: multicentury tree-ring…
Author(s): Penelope Morgan, Emily K. Heyerdahl, Carol Miller, Matthew G. Rollins
Year Published:

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,…
Author(s): Cathy L. Whitlock, Sarah L. Shafer, Jennifer R. Marlon
Year Published: