Topic: Fire Effects and Fire Ecology

Forests are a large carbon sink and could serve as natural climate solutions that help moderatefuture warming. Thus, establishing forest carbon baselines is essential for tracking climate‐mitigation targets.Western US forests are natural climate solution hotspots but are profoundly threatened by…

The number of large, high-severity wildfires has been increasing across the western United States over the last several decades. It is not fully understood how changes in the frequency of large, severe wildfires may impact the resilience of conifer forests, due to alterations in regeneration…

Background

Climate change has increased wildfire activity in the western USA and limited the capacity for forests to recover post-fire, especially in areas burned at high severity. Land managers urgently need a better understanding of the spatiotemporal variability in natural post-fire…

As wildfire activity increases and fire-size distributions potentially shift in many forested regions worldwide, anticipating the spatial patterns of burn severity expected with future fire activity is critical for ecological understanding and informing management and policy. Because spatial…

Background

Drought, fire, and insects are increasing mortality of pine species throughout the northern temperate zone as climate change progresses. Tree survival may be enhanced by forest diversity, with growth rates often higher in mixed stands, but whether tree…

Background

Near-term forecasts of fire danger based on predicted surface weather and fuel dryness are widely used to support the decisions of wildfire managers. The incorporation of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns into predictive models may provide additional value in…

Prescribed burning is a key management strategy within fire-adapted systems, and improved monitoring approaches are needed to evaluate its effectiveness in achieving social-ecological outcomes. Remote sensing provides opportunities to analyse the impacts of prescribed burning, yet a…

Spatially explicit global estimates of forest carbon storage are typically coarsely scaled. While useful, these estimates do not account for the variability and distribution of carbon at management scales. We asked how climate, topography, and disturbance regimes interact across and within…

The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical…

Fire ecology is a complex discipline that can only be understood by integrating biological, physical, and social sciences. The science of fire ecology explores wildland fire’s mechanisms and effects across all scales of time and space. However, the lack of defined, organizing concepts in fire…