Research Database
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
Going slow to go fast: landscape designs to achieve multiple benefits
Year: 2025
Introduction: Growing concerns about fire across the western United States, and commensurate emphasis on treating expansive areas over the next 2 decades, have created a need to develop tools for managers to assess management benefits and impacts across spatial scales. We modeled outcomes associated with two common forest management objectives: fire risk reduction (fire), and enhancing multiple resource benefits (ecosystem resilience).Method: We evaluated the compatibility of these two objectives across ca. 1-million ha in the central Sierra Nevada,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Quantifying Western US tree carbon stocks and sequestration from fires
Year: 2025
Background: Forest ecosystems function as the largest terrestrial carbon sink globally. In the Western US, fires play a crucial role in modifying forest carbon storage, sequestration capacity, and the transfer of carbon from live to dead carbon pools. We utilized remeasurements of more than 700,000 trees from 24,000 locations from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) and incorporated supplementary information on wildfires from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity dataset. These datasets allowed us to develop models that examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfires drive multi-year water quality degradation over the western United States
Year: 2025
Wildfires can dramatically alter water quality, resulting in severe implications for human and freshwater systems. However, regional-scale assessments of these impacts are often limited by data scarcity. Here, we unify observations from 1984–2021 in 245 burned watersheds across the western United States, comparing post-fire signals to baseline levels from 293 unburned basins. Organic carbon and phosphorus exhibit significantly elevated levels (p ≤ 0.05) in the first 1–5 years post-fire, while nitrogen and sediment show significant increases up to 8 years post-fire. During peak post-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Unpacking the Taxonomy of Wildland Fire Collaboratives in the United States West: Impact of Response Diversity on Social-Ecological Resilience
Year: 2025
We offer the first study unpacking the taxonomy of collaboratives that undertake wildland fire management and how that taxonomy relates to resilience. We developed a comprehensive inventory totaling 133 collaboratives across twelve states in the western United States. We extracted each collaborative’s vision, mission, program goals, actions, and stakeholder composition. Based on this data we summarize temporal and spatial trends in collaborative formation and discuss formation drivers. Furthermore, we developed a cluster map of collaboratives based on patterns of co-occurrence of…
collaborative governance, social ecological systems, Social and ecological resilience, adaptive management
Publication Type: Journal Article