Research Database
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
Anthropogenic climate change contributes to wildfire particulate matter and related mortality in the United States
Year: 2025
Climate change has increased forest fire extent in temperate and boreal North America. Here, we quantified the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to human mortality and economic burden from exposure to wildfire particulate matter at the county and state level across the contiguous US (2006 to 2020) by integrating climate projections, climate-wildfire models, wildfire smoke models, and emission and health impact modeling. Climate change contributed to approximately 15,000 wildfire particulate matter deaths over 15 years with interannual variability ranging from 130 (95% confidence…
Climate Change and Fire, Economic Impacts of Fire, Smoke and Air Quality, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Valuing co-benefits of forest fuels treatment for reducing wildfire risk in California's Sierra Nevada
Year: 2025
As wildfires in the western United States grow in frequency and severity, forest fuels treatment has been increasingly recognized as essential for enhancing forest resilience and mitigating wildfire risks. However, the economic valuation of the treatment's co-benefits remains underexplored, limiting integration into financial and policy decision making. Using highly forested land in California's Sierra Nevada as study areas, this study provides a methodology to quantify the economic benefits of forest fuels treatment in mitigating wildfire-induced losses across multiple ecosystem services,…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Finding floral and faunal species richness optima among active fire regimes
Year: 2025
Changing fire regimes have important implications for biodiversity and challenge traditional conservation approaches that rely on historical conditions as proxies for ecological integrity. This historical-centric approach becomes increasingly tenuous under climate change, necessitating direct tests of environmental impacts on biodiversity. At the same time, widespread departures from historical fire regimes have limited the ability to sample diverse fire histories. We examined 2 areas in California's Sierra Nevada (USA) with active fire regimes to study the responses of bird, plant, and bat…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Showy dragonflies are being driven extinct by warming and wildfire
Year: 2025
Rising temperatures may disrupt reproduction before becoming lethal; thus mating traits could define species vulnerability to warming. Here, using >1,600 estimates of local extinction for 60 dragonfly species, we show that species with mating-associated wing ornamentation experienced more extinctions and lost more habitat under warming and following wildfire burn than non-ornamented species. By contrast, sensitivity was not affected by ecological traits, such as thermal limits, habitat specialization or body size.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire gives avian populations a rapid and enduring boost in protected forests of California
Year: 2025
BackgroundFire can impact ecosystems and species over both short and long timeframes, resulting in pervasive impacts on the structure of avian communities. While recent research has highlighted the strong impact of fire on bird communities in the short term, there remains a need for understanding long-term population processes following fire, particularly in forested landscapes that are burning more frequently than in the past century. We analyzed avian response to fire using point-count data from 1999–2019 within national parks of the Sierra Nevada Inventory & Monitoring Network,…
Publication Type: Journal Article