Topic: Fire History

Changes in wildfire regimes may disrupt ecosystem processes as wildfires burn larger areas or burn more frequently than the recent natural range of variability. The climatic drivers of wildfire behavior may change in strength, but these effects are not likely to be uniform across space and…

Background

Since the late 1800s, the US government has largely removed Indigenous fire stewardship practices from the landscape by implementing a top-down fire suppression system that criminalized traditional fire practices and denaturalized the role of fire in forested…

Wild and intentionally ignited fires are not new to North American landscapes or to the Indigenous cultures whose ancestral places encompass them. For millennia, Indigenous fire stewardship has been regionally and locally distributed across North American ecosystems. These practices reshaped…

Background

Large, severe fires are increasing throughout frequent-fire forests of the western United States due to warming climatic conditions, as well as legacies of early twentieth century land-use practices and anthropogenic fire exclusion. Resource objective (RO)…

Adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in 1994 marked a pivotal moment in federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest, shifting focus away from intensive timber harvest toward an ecosystem management approach that emphasized late successional and old forest habitat with the creation…

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires globally, yet our understanding of these high-impact events remains uneven and shaped by media attention and regional research biases. The State of Wildfires project systematically tracks global and regional fire…

Background

The increasing size, severity, and frequency of wildfires is one of the most rapid ways climate warming could alter the structure and function of high-latitude ecosystems. Historically, boreal forests in western North America had fire return intervals (FRI) of 70–130 years,…

Background

Catastrophic wildfire has escalated across the globe in recent decades with devastating consequences for human communities and native ecosystems. Global change processes, including climate warming and land use practices, are altering fuels, fire risk, and ecosystem recovery.…

Background

The active use of wildfire to meet forest management objectives is an important tool to increase the scale of forest restoration in dry, historically frequent-fire forests. While there are many benefits of reintroducing fire to these forests, the impact of…

Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing…