Large high-severity burn patches are increasingly common in southwestern US dry conifer forests. Seed-obligate conifers often fail to quickly regenerate large patches because their seeds rarely travel the distances required to reach core patch area.
The USDA Forest Service recently launched a Wildfire Crisis Strategy outlining objectives to safeguard communities and other values at risk by substantially increasing the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatment.
Interactions between urban and wildfire pollution emissions are active areas of research, with numerous aircraft field campaigns and satellite analyses of wildfire pollution being conducted in recent years. Several studies have found that elevated ozone and particulate pollution levels are both generally associated with wildfire smoke in urban areas.
Understanding fire and large herbivore interactions in interior western forests is critical, owing to the extensive and widespread co-occurrence of these two disturbance types and multiple present and future implications for forest resilience, conservation and restoration.
Anthropogenic climate change is altering the state of worldwide fire regimes, including by increasing the number of days per year when vegetation is dry enough to burn. Indices representing the percent moisture content of dead fine fuels as derived from meteorological data have been used to assess geographic patterns and temporal trends in vegetation flammability.
Theory predicts that effective environmental governance requires that the scales of management account for the scales of environmental processes. A good example is community wildfire protection planning. Plan boundaries that are too narrowly defined may miss sources of wildfire risk originating at larger geographic scales whereas boundaries that are too broadly defined dilute resources.
Tree establishment following severe or stand-replacing disturbance is critical for achieving U.S. climate change mitigation goals and for maintaining the co-benefits of intact forest ecosystems.