Wildfires are a growing concern to society and the environment in many parts of the world. Within the United States, the land area burned by wildfires has steadily increased over the past 40 years. Agricultural land management is widely understood as a force that alters fire regimes, but less is known about how wildfires, in turn, impact the agriculture sector.

The invasive annual grass, medusahead, infests rangelands throughout the West, from the Columbia Plateau to the California Annual Grasslands and the Great Basin.

Climate change has contributed to increased wildfires. Wildfire smoke exposes wildlife to hazards and mortality from particulate matter on a scale larger than the area impacted by fire.

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.

This paper investigates the causal effect of wildfire exposure on birth outcomes and older people’s health outcomes in United States (US).

Fire exclusion and past management have altered the composition, structure, and function of frequent-fire forests throughout western North America. In mixed-conifer forests of the California Sierra Nevada, fire exclusion has exacerbated the effects of drought and endemic bark beetles, resulting in extensive mortality of fire-adapted pine species.

Fire suppression and past selective logging of large trees have fundamentally changed frequent-fire-adapted forests in California. The culmination of these changes produced forests that are vulnerable to catastrophic change by wildfire, drought, and bark beetles, with climate change exacerbating this vulnerability.

As the climate continues to warm, the severity of wildfires is increasing. However, the potential impact of higher burn severity on ecosystem resilience and regional carbon balance is still not clear. There are ongoing debates regarding whether increased burn severity stimulates or delays postfire vegetation and carbon recovery.

Climate change and disturbance are altering forests and the rates and locations of tree regeneration. In semi-arid forests of the southwestern USA, limitations imposed by hot and dry conditions are likely to influence seedling survival.

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.