Dry conifer forests in the western US historically experienced frequent fire prior to European American colonization. Mean fire return interval ranged from about 5–35 years, with the majority of fires burning at low-to-moderate severity.
The influence of forest treatments on wildfire effects is challenging to interpret. This is, in part, because the impact forest treatments have on wildfire can be slight and variable across many factors. Effectiveness of a treatment also depends on the metric considered.
1. Fire is an inherently evolutionary process, even though much more emphasis has been given to ecological responses of plants and their associated communities to fire. 2.
High-severity fires and short-interval reburns strongly influence forest structure and composition and may overwhelm forest ecosystem resilience and catalyze persistent shifts to non-forest conditions.
High-severity wildfires create pulses of snags that serve a variety of functions as they decompose over time. Snag-related benefits (and hazards) are often linked to specific decomposition stages, but snag decomposition rates and pathways are not well understood in many forest types.
The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using proactive forest management (e.g. forest thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning) to mitigate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests.
Background: Pre-fire fuels, topography, and weather influence wildfire behaviour and fire-driven ecosystem carbon loss. However, the pre-fire characteristics that contribute to fire behaviour and effects are often understudied for wildfires because measurements are difficult to obtain.
In the province of British Columbia, Canada, four of the most severe wildfire seasons of the last century occurred in the past 7 years: 2017, 2018, 2021, and 2023. To investigate trends in wildfire activity and fire-conducive climate, we conducted an analysis of mapped wildfire perimeters and annual climate data for the period of 1919–2021.
Background: Wildfire simultaneity affects the availability and distribution of resources for fire management: multiple small fires require more resources to fight than one large fire does. Aims: The aim of this study was to project the effects of climate change on simultaneous large wildfires in the Western USA, regionalised by administrative divisions used for wildfire management.
Wildfires and fire seasons are commonly rated largely on the simple metric of area burned (more hectares: bad). A seemingly paradoxical narrative frames large fire seasons as a symptom of a forest health problem (too much fire), while simultaneously stating that fire-dependent forests lack sufficient fire to maintain system resilience (too little fire).