Research Database
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Beyond average: a new approach to calculating fire regime departures applied to Western United States forests
Year: 2026
BackgroundChanges in climate and vegetation, in combination with fire exclusion, are altering and homogenizing fire regime attributes compared to historical conditions. Fire regime changes are commonly quantified using departure metrics based on differences in measures of central tendency (i.e., means) between time periods. These metrics can mischaracterize complex changes to fire regime attributes because the distributions underlying these attributes are often not well described by parameters.ResultsWe developed a non-parametric index of fire regime…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Western United States Large Forest-Fire Stochastic Simulator (WULFFSS) 1.0: a monthly gridded forest-fire model using interpretable statistics
Year: 2026
We developed the WULFFSS, a stochastic monthly gridded forest-fire model for the western United States (US). Operating at 12 km resolution, WULFFSS calculates monthly probabilities of fires that burn at least 100 ha of forest area as well as the forest area burned per fire. The model is forced by variables related to vegetation, topographic, anthropogenic, and climate factors, organized into three indices representing spatial, annual-cycle, and lower frequency temporal domains. These indices can interact, so variables promoting fire in one domain amplify fire-promoting effects in another.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predictive Understanding of Wildfire Ignitions Across the Western United States
Year: 2026
Wildfires have increasingly affected human and natural systems across the western United States (WUS) in recent decades. Given that the majority of ignitions are human-caused and potentially preventable, improving the ability to predict fire occurrence is critical for effective wildfire prevention and risk mitigation. We used over 500,000 wildfire ignition records from 2000 to 2020 to develop machine learning models that predict daily ignition probability across the WUS and incorporate a wide range of physical, biological, social, and administrative variables. A key innovation of this work is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fighting Fire With Fires: The Fire-Fuel Feedback Effect in Canadian Forests
Year: 2026
AimClimate-driven fire increases could be modified by fire-fuel feedback, as recent fires reduce burnable fuels for future fires. Knowing the effects of fire-fuel feedback is essential for more accurate projection of fire activity, which, however, has often been overlooked due to the challenge in its quantification. This study aims to project future fire activity under the changing climates with consideration for fire-fuel feedback effects across Canada.LocationCanadian forests.Time Period1981–2100.Major Taxa StudiedTrees.MethodsWe projected future changes in a full set of fire activity…
Publication Type: Journal Article