Topic: Fire Effects and Fire Ecology

Fire is one of the most important natural disturbance processes in the western United States and ecosystems differ markedly with respect to their ecological and evolutionary relationships with fire. Reference fire regimes in forested ecosystems can be categorized along a gradient ranging from “…

Fire has profound effects on ecosystem properties, but few studies have addressed the effect of repeated burns on soil nutrients, and none have been conducted in cold desert ecosystems where invasion by exotic annual grasses is resulting in greater fire frequency.

Disturbances are integral to ecological systems and affect landscapes across a wide range of scales. The causes of disturbance, the patterns and dynamics they produce, their ecological consequences are major research topics in landscape ecology. Interest stemmed initially from recognition that…

The widespread, native defoliator western spruce budworm (Choristoneura occidentalis Freeman) reduces canopy fuels, which might affect the potential for surface fires to torch (ignite the crowns of individual trees) or crown (spread between tree crowns). However, the effects of defoliation on…

Comprehensive assessment of ecological change after fires have burned forests and rangelands is important if we are to understand, predict and measure fire effects. We highlight the challenges in effective assessment of fire and burn severity in the field and using both remote sensing and…

Although fire is a common disturbance in shrub–steppe, few studies have specifically tested burned area mapping accuracy in these semiarid to arid environments. We conducted a preliminary assessment of the accuracy of the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) burned area product on four…

Wildland fire is an important natural process in many ecosystems. However, fire exclusion has reduced frequency of fire and area burned in many dry forest types, which may affect vegetation structure and composition, and potential fire behavior. In forests of the western U.S., these effects pose…

Warmer and drier climate over the past few decades has brought larger fire sizes and increased annual area burned in forested ecosystems of western North America, and continued increases in annual area burned are expected due to climate change. As warming continues, fires may also increase in…

In parts of central Oregon, coarse-textured pumice substrates limit forest composition to low-density lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Douglas ex Loudon var. latifolia Engelm. ex S. Watson) with scattered ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson) and a shrub understory dominated by…

The degree to which harvesting can achieve comparable beneficial effects to wildfire on seedling establishment is a key factor in understanding regeneration dynamics in dry interior forest ecosystems. We compared the capacity of harvesting versus wildfire to support establishment of directly-…