Research Database
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High-severity burned area and proportion exceed historic conditions in Sierra Nevada, California, and adjacent ranges
Year: 2023
Although fire is a fundamental ecological process in western North American forests, climate warming and accumulating forest fuels due to fire suppression have led to wildfires that burn at high severity across larger fractions of their footprint than were historically typical. These trends have spiked upwards in recent years and are particularly pronounced in the Sierra Nevada–Southern Cascades ecoregion of California, USA, and neighboring states. We assessed annual area burned (AAB) and percentage of area burned at high and low-to-moderate severity for seven major forest types in this…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions Between Fire Refugia and Climate-Environment Conditions Determine Mesic Subalpine Forest Recovery After Large and Severe Wildfires
Year: 2022
Infrequent stand-replacing wildfires are characteristic of mesic and/or cool conifer forests in western North America, where forest recovery within high-severity burn patch interiors can be slow, yet successful over long temporal periods (decades to centuries). Increasing fire frequency and high-severity burn patch size, under a warming climate, however, may challenge post-fire forest recovery, promoting landscape-level shifts in forest structure, composition, and distribution of non-forest patches. Crucial to a delay and/or impediment to this shift, fire refugia (i.e., remnant seed sources)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Dry Forests of the Northeastern Cascades Fire and Fire Surrogate Project Site, Mission Creek, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest
Year: 2009
The Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) project is a large long-term metastudy established to assess the effectiveness and ecological impacts of burning and fire “surrogates” such as cuttings and mechanical fuel treatments that are used instead of fire, or in combination with fire, to restore dry forests. One of the 13 national FFS sites is the Northeastern Cascades site at Mission Creek on the Okanogan- Wenatchee National Forest. The study area includes 12 forested stands that encompass a representative range of dry forest conditions in the northeastern Cascade Range. We describe site histories…
Publication Type: Report