Research Database
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A horizon scan to inform research priorities on post-wildfire forest restoration and recovery in the western United States
Year: 2025
The frequency, severity, and scale of extreme wildfire events is increasing globally, with certain regions such as the western United States disproportionately impacted. As attention shifts toward understanding how to adapt to and recover from extreme wildfire, there is a need to prioritize where additional research and evidence are needed to inform decision-making. In this paper, we use a horizon-scanning approach to identify key topics that could guide post-wildfire forest restoration and recovery efforts in the western United States over the next few decades. Horizon scanning is a method…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evidence for strong bottom-up controls on fire severity during extreme events
Year: 2025
BackgroundRecord fire years in recent decades have challenged post-fire forest recovery in the western United States and beyond. To improve management responses, it is critical that we understand the conditions under which management can mitigate severe wildfire impacts, and when it cannot. Here, we evaluated the influence of top-down and bottom-up fire severity forcings on 17 wildfires occurring during two consecutive record-setting years in the eastern Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Despite much of the area having been burned after an extended period of fire…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
Frequent, heterogenous fire supports a forest owl assemblage
Year: 2025
Fire shapes biodiversity in many forested ecosystems, but historical management practices and anthropogenic climate change have led to larger, more severe fires that threaten many animal species where such disturbances do not occur naturally. As predators, owls can play important ecological roles in biological communities, but how changing fire regimes affect individual species and species assemblages is largely unknown. Here, we examined the impact of fire severity, history, and configuration over the past 35 years on an assemblage of six forest owl species in the Sierra Nevada, California,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severity of a megafire reduced by interactions of wildland fire suppression operations and previous burns
Year: 2024
Burned area and proportion of high severity fire have been increasing in the western USA, and reducing wildfire severity with fuel treatments or other means is key for maintaining fire-prone dry forests and avoiding fire-catalyzed forest loss. Despite the unprecedented scope of firefighting operations in recent years, their contribution to patterns of wildfire severity is rarely quantified. Here we investigate how wildland fire suppression operations and past fire severity interacted to affect severity patterns of the northern third of the 374 000 ha Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in…
Publication Type: Journal Article