Fire History

High-severity, infrequent fires in forests shape landscape mosaics of stand age and structure for decades to centuries, and forest structure can vary substantially even among same-aged stands. This variability among stand structures can affect landscape-scale carbon and nitrogen cycling, wildlife habitat availability, and vulnerability to subsequent disturbances.

Context In the interior Northwest, debate over restoring mixed-conifer forests after a century of fire exclusion is hampered by poor understanding of the pattern and causes of spatial variation in historical fire regimes.

A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States.

An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western United States remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway.

Dendroecology is the science that dates tree rings to their exact calendar year of formation to study processes that influence forest ecology (e.g., Speer 2010 [1], Amoroso et al., 2017 [2]). Reconstruction of past fire regimes is a core application of dendroecology, linking fire history to population dynamics and climate effects on tree growth and survivorship.

Modern works by highly skilled narrative authors and artists have become increasingly useful for telling the story of wildland fire in the United States.

On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research.

We examine the influence of wildfire institutions on management and forest resilience over time, drawing on research from a multiownership, frequent-fire, coupled human and natural system (CHANS) in the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA.

Numerous studies have documented significant change in conifer forests of the American West following the cessation of recurrent fire at the end of the 19th century. But the successional dynamics that characterize different forested settings in the absence of fire remain poorly understood.

We examined stand structure, demography, and fire history using tree cores and fire scar data across an approximately 7000-hectare study area over an elevational gradient in the southern Cascade Range, Oregon, USA. Our plots were located in mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana [Bong.] Carr), red fir (Abies magnifica A.