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Research Database

Displaying 21 - 40 of 137

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‐…
Climate Change and Fire, Fire Effects and Fire Ecology
fire severity, post-fire, remote sensing
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…
Communicating about Fire, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
community, resilience, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Wildfire recovery in Pacific Northwest Latine communities: how community capitals shape disaster resilience

Year: 2025
Wildfires are increasingly affecting people’s lives in the Pacific Northwest. Latine populations, in particular, often face unique challenges in their recovery process. This study examines individual Latine wildfire recovery experiences to understand the strengths and barriers in the community’s post-fire recovery process in two wildfire-affected areas in Oregon and Washington. Perceptions of recovery of Latine community members and community-based organizations that serve these populations were collected through focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation at…
Social and Community Impacts of Fire
post-fire, human dimensions, adaptation
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…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Prescribed Burning
post-fire, tree mortality
Publication Type: Journal Article

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…
Mixed-Conifer Management, Soils and Woody Debris
post-fire, forest understory, biochar
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…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology
post-fire, hydrology
Publication Type: Journal Article

Insights from a 25-year database of post-fire debris flows in California

Year: 2025
BackgroundPost-wildfire debris flows (PFDFs) frequently threaten life, property and infrastructure in California. To date, there is no comprehensive assessment of their spatial distribution, seasonality, atmospheric drivers and interannual variability across the state.AimsWe develop a database of PFDF events in California for the period 2000–2024 and analyze the database to describe spatial and temporal variability and impacts of PFDFs.MethodsWe use peer-reviewed literature, media and agency reports to compile the PFDF event database and…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Risk Assessment and Analysis
postfire debris flow, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Long-term influence of prescribed burning on subsequent wildfire in an old-growth coast redwood forest

Year: 2025
Background: Prescribed burning is an effective tool for reducing fuels in many forest types, yet there have been few opportunities to study forest resilience to wildfire in areas previously treated. In 2020, a large-scale high-intensity wildfire burned through an old-growth coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest with a mixed land management history, providing a rare opportunity to compare early post-wildfire data between areas with and without previous application of prescribed burning. The purpose of this study was to analyze the differences between these two treatments in…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Prescribed Burning
post-fire, resilience, tree mortality, forest structure
Publication Type: Journal Article

Model analysis of post-fire management and potential reburn fire behavior

Year: 2024
Recent trends in wildfire area burned have been characterized by large patches with high densities of standing dead trees, well outside of historical range of variability in many areas and presenting forest managers with difficult decisions regarding post-fire management. Post-fire tree harvesting, commonly called salvage logging, is a controversial management tactic that is often undertaken to recoup economic loss and, more recently, also to reduce future fuel hazard, especially when coupled with surface fuel reduction. It is unclear, however, whether the reductions in future fuels translate…
Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Soils and Woody Debris
post-fire, fire severity, management
Publication Type: Journal Article

Disentangling drivers of annual grass invasion: Abiotic susceptibility vs. fire-induced conversion to cheatgrass dominance in the sagebrush biome

Year: 2024
Invasive annual grasses are often facilitated by fire, yet they can become ecologically dominant in susceptible locations even in the absence of fire. We used an extensive vegetation plot database to model susceptibility to the invasive annual grass cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) in the sagebrush biome as a function of climate and soil water availability variables. We built random forest models predicting cheatgrass presence or dominance (>15 % relative cover) under unburned (37,219 plots) and burned conditions (6340 plots). We mapped predicted probability of cheatgrass…
Fire and Rangelands
disturbance, sagebrush, invasive species, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Drought before fire increases tree mortality after fire

Year: 2024
Fire and drought are expected to increase in frequency and severity in temperate forests due to climate change. To evaluate whether drought increases the likelihood of post-fire tree mortality, we used a large database of tree survival and mortality from 32 years of wildland fires covering four dominant western North American conifers. We used Bayesian hierarchical modeling to predict the probability of individual tree mortality after fire based on species—Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine), Abies concolor (white fir), Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas-fir), and Pinus…
Climate Change and Fire, Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Mixed-Conifer Management
ponderosa pine, tree mortality, post-fire, drought
Publication Type: Journal Article

Nonstructural carbohydrates explain post-fire tree mortality and recovery patterns

Year: 2024
Trees use nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs) to support many functions, including recovery from disturbances. However, NSC’s importance for recovery following fire and whether NSC depletion contributes to post-fire delayed mortality are largely unknown. We investigated how fire affects NSCs based on fire-caused injury from a prescribed fire in a young Pinus ponderosa (Lawson & C. Lawson) stand. We assessed crown injury (needle scorch and bud kill) and measured NSCs of needles and inner bark (i.e., secondary phloem) of branches and main stems of trees subject to fire and at an…
Prescribed Burning
post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Rare and highly destructive wildfires drive human migration in the U.S.

Year: 2024
The scale of wildfire impacts to the built environment is growing and will likely continue under rising average global temperatures. We investigate whether and at what destruction threshold wildfires have influenced human mobility patterns by examining the migration effects of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020. We find that only the most extreme wildfires (258+ structures destroyed) influenced migration patterns. In contrast, the majority of wildfires examined were less destructive and did not cause significant changes to out- or in-migration. These…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
post-fire, community, wildland fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Pile burns as a proxy for high severity wildfire impacts on soil microbiomes

Year: 2024
Wildfires in the western US are increasing in frequency, size, and severity. These disturbances alter soil microbiome structure and function, with greater fire severity leading to more pronounced impacts to bacterial, archaeal, and fungal communities. These changes have implications for the provisioning of microbially-mediated ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, clean water supplies) typically associated with forested watersheds. Challenges in sampling wildfire-impacted areas immediately post-burn have limited our assessment of short-term (i.e., days to weeks) changes in the soil…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Prescribed Burning, Soils and Woody Debris
post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Landsat assessment of variable spectral recovery linked to post-fire forest structure in dry sub-boreal forests

Year: 2024
Forest disturbances such as wildfires can dramatically alter forest structure and composition, increasing the likelihood of ecosystem changes. Up-to-date and accurate measures of post-disturbance forest recovery in managed forests are critical, particularly for silvicultural planning. Measuring the live and dead vegetation post-fire is challenging because areas impacted by wildfire may be remote, difficult to access, and/or dangerous to survey. The difficulties of post-fire monitoring are compounded by the global increase in the frequency and severity of disturbances, as expansion of…
Risk Assessment and Analysis
remote sensing, disturbance, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

‘Mind the Gap’—reforestation needs vs. reforestation capacity in the western United States

Year: 2024
Tree establishment following severe or stand-replacing disturbance is critical for achieving U.S. climate change mitigation goals and for maintaining the co-benefits of intact forest ecosystems. In many contexts, natural post-fire tree regeneration is sufficient to maintain forest cover and associated ecosystem services, but increasingly the pattern and scale of disturbance exceeds ecological thresholds and active reforestation may be warranted. Our capacity to plant trees, however, is not keeping pace with reforestation needs. This shortfall is uniquely apparent in the western U.S., where…
Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
post-fire, resilience
Publication Type: Journal Article

Trees have similar growth responses to first-entry fires and reburns following long-term fire exclusion

Year: 2024
Managing fire ignitions for resource benefit decreases fuel loads and reduces the risk of high-severity fire in fire-suppressed dry conifer forests. However, the reintroduction of low-severity wildfire can injure trees, which may decrease their growth after fire. Post-fire growth responses could change from first-entry fires to reburns, as first-entry fires reduce fuel loads and the vulnerability among trees to fire effects, which may result in trees sustaining less damage during reburns. To determine whether trees had growth responses that varied from first-entry fires to reburns, we cored…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fuels and Fuel Treatments
fire severity, wildland fire, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Before the fire: predicting burn severity and potential post-fire debris-flow hazards to conservation populations of the Colorado River Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii pleuriticus)

Year: 2024
Background: Colorado River Cutthroat Trout (CRCT; Oncorhynchus clarkii pleuriticus) conservation populations may be at risk from wildfire and post-fire debris flows hazards. Aim: To predict burn severity and potential post-fire debris flow hazard classifications to CRCT conservation populations before wildfires occur. Methods: We used remote sensing, spatial analyses, and machine learning to model 28 wildfire incidents (2016–2020) and spatially predict burn severity from pre-wildfire environmental factors to evaluate the likelihood…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Soils and Woody Debris
post-fire, wildfire and water, wildlife, fire severity, remote sensing
Publication Type: Journal Article

Fire severity drives understory community dynamics and the recovery of culturally significant plants

Year: 2024
Anthropogenic influences are altering fire regimes worldwide, resulting in an increase in the size and severity of wildfires. Simultaneously, throughout western North America, there is increasing recognition of the important role of Indigenous fire stewardship in shaping historical fire regimes and fire-adapted ecosystems. However, there is limited understanding of how ecosystems are affected by or recover from contemporary “megafires,” particularly in terms of understory plant communities that are critical to both biodiversity and Indigenous cultures. To address this gap, our collaborative…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology
fire severity, forest understory, post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article

Prescribed fire increases forage mineral content in grazed rangeland

Year: 2024
BackgroundSustainable rangeland management balances production and conservation. While a broad literature describes the conservation benefits of prescribed fire, benefits for livestock production have emerged more slowly. Mineral nutrition is important for livestock health and performance, but the impact of prescribed fire on mineral concentration of forages, especially in the northern US Great Plains, remains unknown.AimsWe investigated how burning affects the mineral concentration of forage early and late in the growing season.MethodsData…
Fire and Rangelands, Prescribed Burning
post-fire
Publication Type: Journal Article