Topic: Fire History

Rising global fire activity is increasing the prevalence of repeated short-interval burning (reburning) in forests worldwide. In forests that historically experienced frequent-fire regimes, high-severity fire exacerbates the severity of subsequent fires by increasing prevalence of shrubs and/or…

1. In southwestern US forests, the combined impact of climate change and increased fuel loads due to more than a century of human-caused fire exclusion is leading to larger and more severe wildfires. Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests can mitigate high-severity fire risk, but the…

Fire is a key disturbance process that shapes the structure and function of montane temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Recent research is revealing more frequent historical fire activity in the western central Cascades than expected by conventional theory. Indigenous peoples…

Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and…

Ecocultural restoration involves the reciprocal repair of ecosystems and revitalization of cultural practices to enhance their mutual resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate change stressors. Resilient ecocultural systems are adapted to retain structure and function in…

Across western North America (WNA), 20th-21st century anthropogenic warming has increased the prevalence and severity of concurrent drought and heat events, also termed hot droughts. However, the lack of independent spatial reconstructions of both soil moisture and temperature limits the…

Accelerating disturbance activity under a warming climate increases the potential for multiple disturbances to overlap and produce compound effects that erode ecosystem resilience — the capacity to experience disturbance without transitioning to an alternative state. A key concern is the…

1. Wildfires strongly influence forest ecosystem processes, including carbon and nutrient cycling, and vegetation dynamics. As fire activity increases under changing climate conditions, the ecological and biogeochemical resilience of many forest ecosystems remains unknown.


2. To…

Historical logging practices and fire exclusion have reduced the proportion of pine in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States. To better understand pine’s decline, we investigate the impact of historical logging on the tree regeneration layer and subsequent stand development over…