Forests are essential in regulating global carbon and water cycles and are critical in mitigating climate change.
Vegetation structure affects the vulnerability of a forest to drought events and wildfires. Management decisions, such as thinning intensity and type of understory treatment, influence competition for water resources and amount of fuel available.
Highlights • Lizards surviving wildfires are more alert to fire sound than those in unburned areas. • Lizards living in urban areas reacted to fire sound similarly to wildfire survivors. • Both natural and human-driven disturbances can shape the behaviour of animals. • Fires are likely to be an important selective pressure on animal behaviour.
Context Addressing ecosystem degradation in the Anthropocene will require ecological restoration across large spatial extents. Identifying areas where natural regeneration will occur without direct resource investment will improve scalability of restoration actions.
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.
Ecological disturbance regimes across the globe are being altered via direct and indirect human influences. Biodiversity loss at multiple scales can be a direct outcome of these shifts.
Anticipating consequences of disturbance interactions on ecosystem structure and function is a critical management priority as disturbance activity increases with warming climate. Across the Northern Hemisphere, extensive tree mortality from recent bark beetle outbreaks raises concerns about potential fire behavior and post-fire forest function.
Highlights • Wildfire may exacerbate health disparities & environmental justice concerns. • Low-cost PM2.5 sensors improve wildfire impact assessment. • Increases in PM2.5 correlate with wildfire activity (within 30 km). • Indoor increases in PM2.5 concentrations mimic outdoor PM2.5 increase patterns.
Foliar moisture content influences crown fire ignition and behaviour. Some spatial variation in foliar moisture is attributable to differences in stand conditions but evidence describing this role is lacking or contradicting. Aims.
Background. Previous work by the author and others has examined weather associated with growth of exceptionally large fires (‘Fires of Unusual Size’, or FOUS), looking at three of four factors associated with critical fire weather patterns: antecedent drying, high wind and low humidity. However, the authors did not examine atmospheric stability, the fourth factor. Aims.