Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 205
Long-term soil nutrient and understory plant responses to post-fire rehabilitation in a lodgepole pine forest
Year: 2025
Wildfires and other disturbances play a fundamental role in regenerating lodgepole pine forests. Though severe, stand-replacing fires are typical of this ecosystem, they can have dramatic impacts on soil properties and biogeochemical processes that influence the rate and composition of vegetation recovery. Organic soil amendments are often applied to manage post-fire erosion, but they can also improve soil moisture and nutrient retention and potentially alter the trajectory of post-fire revegetation. We compared change in soil nutrients, microbial communities, and understory plant cover and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Small-scale fire refugia increase soil bacterial and fungal richness and increase community cohesion nine years after fire
Year: 2025
Small-scale variation in wildfire behavior may cause large differences in belowground bacterial and fungal communities with consequences for belowground microbial diversity, community assembly, and function. Here we combine pre-fire, active-fire, and post-wildfire measurements in a mixed-conifer forest to identify how fine-scale wildfire behavior, unburned refugia, and aboveground forest structure are associated with belowground bacterial and fungal communities nine years after wildfire. We used fine-scale mapping of small (0.9–172.6 m2) refugia to sample soil-associated burned and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Household needs among wildfire survivors in the 2017 Northern California wildfires
Year: 2025
Wildfires are impacting communities globally, with California wildfires often breaking records of size and destructiveness. Knowing how communities are affected by these wildfires is vital to understanding recovery. We sought to identify impacted communities' post-wildfire needs and characterize how those needs change over time. The WHAT-Now study deployed a survey that was made publicly available for communities affected by the October 2017 Northern California wildfires or the accompanying smoke at beginning approximately four months post-fire with the vast majority completed by nine months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mobile radar provides insights into hydrologic responses in burn areas
Year: 2025
Background. Wildfires often occur in mountainous terrain, regions that pose substantial challenges to operational meteorological and hydrologic observing networks. Aims. A mobile, postfire hydrometeorological observatory comprising remote-sensing and in situ instrumentation was developed and deployed in a burnt area to provide unique insights into rainfall-induced post-fire hazards. Methods. Mobile radar-based rainfall estimates were produced throughout the burn area at 75-m resolution and compared with rain gauge accumulations and basin response variables. Key results. The mobile radar was…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Offsetting the noise: a framework for applying phenological offset corrections in remotely sensed burn severity assessments
Year: 2025
BackgroundPhenological correction of pre- and post-fire imagery is used to improve remotely sensed burn severity evaluations. Unburned offset values standardize greenness between image pairs; however, efficacy across diverse scenarios remains underexplored.AimsWe evaluated the impact of phenological offset correction methods to support analyst decision-making across fire-prone environments.MethodsWe generated burn severity spectral index values for a dataset of Composite Burn Index (CBI) field plots across the conterminous US. The…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland Firefighters Suffer Increasing Risk of Job-Related Death
Year: 2025
Wildland firefighting is a niche specialization in the fire service - inherently dangerous with unique risks. Over the past decade, fatalities amongst all firefighters have decreased; however, wildland firefighter fatalities have increased. This subject has only been described in the grey literature, and a paucity of medical literature exists. The United States Fire Administration's online fatality database was queried for on duty mortality between 1990 and 2022. The year 2001 was excluded due to the 340 deaths that occurred on September 11th. Data collected included demographics, incident…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effects of long-term ecological research and cognitive biases on the evaluation of scientific information by public land managers in Oregon and Washington, USA
Year: 2025
Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access. Barriers, such as paywalls, insufficient capacity, and information overload play an important role in determining what scientific information managers have access and attend to. Additionally, characteristics of managers themselves also influence what scientific information they prioritize and implement. Specific factors likely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Wildland Fire–Related Smoke PM2.5 and Cardiovascular Disease Emergency Department Visits in the Western United States
Year: 2025
BackgroundThe impact of short‐term exposure to fine particulate matter with a diameter ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5) due to wildland fire smoke on the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains unclear. We investigated the association between short‐term exposure to wildfire smoke PM2.5 and emergency department visits for acute CVD in the western United States from 2007 to 2018.MethodsWe analyzed 49 759 958 emergency department visits for primary or secondary diagnoses of atrial fibrillation (AF), acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, stroke, and total CVD across 5…
Publication Type: Journal Article
COVID‐19 Fueled an Elevated Number of Human‐Caused Ignitions in the Western United States During the 2020 Wildfire Season
Year: 2025
The area burned in the western United States during the 2020 fire season was the greatest in the modern era. Here we show that the number of human-caused fires in 2020 also was elevated, nearly 20% higher than the 1992–2019 average. Although anomalously dry conditions enabled ignitions to spread and contributed to record area burned, these conditions alone do not explain the surge in the number of human-caused ignitions. We argue that behavioral shifts aimed at curtailing the spread of COVID-19 altered human-environment interactions to favor increased ignitions. For example, the number of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A cellular necrosis process model for estimating conifer crown scorch
Year: 2025
Fire-caused tree mortality has major impacts on forest ecosystems. One primary cause of post-fire tree mortality in non-resprouting species is crown scorch, the percentage of foliage in a crown that is killed by heat. Despite its importance, the heat required to kill foliage is not well-understood. We used the “lag” model to describe time- and temperature-dependent leaf cell necrosis as a method of predicting leaf scorch. The lag model includes two rate parameters that describe 1) the process of cells accumulating non-lethal damage, and 2) damage becoming lethal to the cell. To parameterize…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme Colorado 2020 fires: remotely sensed burn severity influenced by treatments, forest types, and days of burning
Year: 2025
Forest managers are faced with escalating size, severity, and cost of wildfires. To mitigate this, U.S. federal land management agencies are increasing forest treatments such as mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. While there is a growing body of work on treatment–wildfire interactions, treatment impacts in increasingly extreme wildfire situations remain unknown. Here we examined how treatments and previous wildfires influenced remotely sensed burn severity across four 2020 wildfires in Colorado that burned over 238 000 ha, 10 000 ha of which were treated or experienced…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mental health risk for wildland firefighters: a review and future directions
Year: 2025
Wildland fire is increasingly a consequence of the climate crisis, with growing impacts on communities and individuals. Wildland firefighters are critical to the successful management of wildland fire, yet very limited research has considered mental health in this population. Although a wealth of research in mental health risk and associated risk and protective factors exists for structural firefighters, unique demands of wildland firefighting such as the seasonal nature of work, the length and intensity of shifts, and the often geographically isolated working conditions, among other factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme Fire Spread Events Burn More Severely and Homogenize Postfire Landscapes in the Southwestern United States
Year: 2025
Extreme fire spread events rapidly burn large areas with disproportionate impacts on people and ecosystems. Such events are associated with warmer and drier fire seasons and are expected to increase in the future. Our understanding of the landscape outcomes of extreme events is limited, particularly regarding whether they burn more severely or produce spatial patterns less conducive to ecosystem recovery. To assess relationships between fire spread rates and landscape burn severity patterns, we used satellite fire detections to create day‐of‐burning maps for 623 fires comprising 4267 single‐…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Documenting non-governmental organization (NGO) participation and collaboration during community recovery from wildfire
Year: 2025
Existing research indicates that NGOs can serve important roles during recovery from wildfires and other hazard events. Yet less work explores the specific, place-based conditions that influence NGO participation in the recovery process, or the specific tactics they might use when facilitating the transfer of knowledge and resources that meet emergent recovery needs. The research presented here advances understandings of organizational responses to wildfire by investigating the roles and capacities of NGOs to facilitate place-specific recovery efforts across temporal scales. It draws on 61…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Long-range PM2.5 pollution and health impacts from the 2023 Canadian wildfires
Year: 2025
Smoke from extreme wildfires in Canada adversely affected air quality in many regions in 20231,2. Here we use satellite observations, machine learning and a chemical transport model to quantify global and regional PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 μm in diameter) exposure and human health impacts related to the 2023 Canadian wildfires. We find that the fires increased annual PM2.5 exposure worldwide by 0.17 μg m–3 (95% confidence interval, 0.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fine Particulate Matter From 2020 California Wildfires and Mental Health–Related Emergency Department Visits
Year: 2025
Importance: A growing body of research suggests that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5; particle size 2.5 microns or smaller) may be associated with mental health outcomes. However, the potential impact of wildfire-specific PM2.5 exposure on mental health remains underexplored.Objective: To investigate whether wildfire-specific PM2.5 exposure may be associated with emergency department (ED) visits for mental health conditions, including all-cause and for psychoactive substance use, nonmood psychotic disorders, anxiety, depression, and other mood-affective disorders during the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire directly affects tree carbon balance and indirectly affects hydraulic function: consequences for post-fire mortality in two conifers
Year: 2025
- The mechanistic links between fire-caused injuries and post-fire tree mortality are poorly understood. Current hypotheses differentiate effects of fire on tree carbon balance and hydraulic function, yet critical uncertainties remain about the relative importance of each and how they interact.
- We utilize two prescribed burns with Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine to examine: the relative evidence for fire-caused changes in hydraulic function and carbon dynamics, and how such impacts relate to fire injuries; which impacts most likely lead to post-fire mortality; and how these…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Insights provided by a new searchable repository for post-fire hydrology studies and associated data
Year: 2025
BackgroundAs the number and size of wildfires increase worldwide, so too has the realization that wildfires and hydrology are closely linked. The field of post-fire hydrology has been growing in recent decades, but the resultant datasets and studies are spread across disparate repositories and can be difficult for researchers and decision-makers to access.ResultsTo help address this issue, we have created searchable lists of literature, datasets, and models related to post-fire hydrology which can be accessed—and added to—by any interested members of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article