Research Database
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
Fire refugia are robust across Western US forested ecoregions, 1986–2021
Year: 2023
In the Western US, area burned and fire size have increased due to the influences of climate change, long-term fire suppression leading to higher fuel loads, and increased ignitions. However, evidence is less conclusive about increases in fire severity within these growing wildfire extents. Fires burn unevenly across landscapes, leaving islands of unburned or less impacted areas, known as fire refugia. Fire refugia may enhance post-fire ecosystem function and biodiversity by providing refuge to species and functioning as seed sources after fires. In this study, we evaluated whether the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Refuge-yeah or refuge-nah? Predicting locations of forest resistance and recruitment in a fiery world
Year: 2023
Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth's biota. Fire refugia—locations that are burned less frequently or severely than their surroundings—may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post-fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their value to forest ecosystem persistence, there is an urgent need to anticipate where refugia are most likely to be found and where they align with environmental conditions that support post-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatiotemporal patterns of unburned areas within fire perimeters in the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014
Year: 2018
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Refugia: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter for Global Change?
Year: 2018
Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales, and affected taxa, they have not been characterized systematically over space and time, which is crucial for understanding their role in facilitating resilience in the context of global change. We identify four dichotomies that delineate an overarching conceptual framework of fire refugia: unburned versus lower severity, species-specific versus…
Publication Type: Journal Article