Topic: Fire History

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…

Modern works by highly skilled narrative authors and artists have become increasingly useful for telling the story of wildland fire in the United States. Using unconventional means—and with partial funding by the Joint Fire Science Program—creative individuals have spawned some colorful and…

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. Established in 1915 to centralize and elevate the pursuit of research throughout the agency, the Branch of Research focused on everything from…

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. We constructed social-ecological histories of the study area…

Growing human and ecological costs due to increasing wildfire are an urgent concern in policy and management, particularly given projections of worsening fire conditions under climate change. Thus, understanding the relationship between climatic variation and fire activity is a critically…

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. This…

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…

Describing the climate influences on historical wildland fire will aid managers in planning for future change. This study uses existing historical climate reconstructions and a new fire history from the southern Blue Mountains in eastern Oregon, USA, to: 1) characterize historical fire-climate…

Fire is an important disturbance in many forest landscapes, but there is heightened concern regarding recent wildfire activity in western North America. Several regional-scale studies focus on high-severity fire, but a comprehensive examination at all levels of burn severity (i.e., low, moderate…

In fire-prone forests, self-reinforcing fire behavior may generate a mosaic of vegetation types and structures. In forests long subject to fire exclusion, such feedbacks may result in forest loss when surface and canopy fuel accumulations lead to unusually severe fires. We examined drivers of…