Topic: Fire History

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…

Many western North American forest types have experienced considerable changes in ecosystem structure, composition, and function as a result of both fire exclusion and timber harvesting. These two influences co-occurred over a large portion of dry forests, making it difficult to know the…

In 1935, Elers Koch argued in a Journal of Forestry article that a minimum fire protection model should be implemented in the backcountry areas of national forests in Idaho, USA. As a USDA Forest Service Supervisor and Assistant Regional Forester, Koch had led many major fire-fighting campaigns…

Quantifying historical fire regimes provides important information for managing contemporary forests. Historical fire frequency and severity can be estimated using several methods; each method has strengths and weaknesses and presents challenges for interpretation and verification. Recent…

Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity. Using a severity metric calculated by modelling the cumulative distribution of differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and Relativized dNBR (RdNBR)…

Evidence of shifting dominance among major forest disturbance agent classes regionally to globally has been emerging in the literature. For example, climate-related stress and secondary stressors on forests (e.g., insect and disease, fire) have dramatically increased since the turn of the…

Current phylogenetic evidence shows that fire began shaping the evolution of land plants 125 Ma, although the fossil charcoal record indicates that fire has a much longer history (>350 Ma). Serotiny (on-plant seed storage) is generally accepted as an adaptation to fire among woody plants. We…

Large wildfires in California cause significant socioecological impacts, and half of the federal funds for fire suppression are spent each year in California. Future fire activity is projected to increase with climatechange, but predictions are uncertain because humans can modulate or even…

In a recent PLOS ONE paper, we conducted an evidence-based analysis of current versus historical fire regimes and concluded that traditionally defined reference conditions of low-severity fire regimes for ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and mixed-conifer forests were incomplete, missing…

Fire frequency is assumed to have exerted a strong influence on historical forest communities in the inland Pacific Northwest. This study reconstructs forest structure and composition in the year 1890 and fire frequency from 1760 to 1890 at 10 sites spanning a broad productivity gradient in the…