Fire History

Background: Recent increases in wildfire activity in the Western USA are commonly attributed to a confuence of factors including climate change, human activity, and the accumulation of fuels due to fire suppression. However, a shortage of long-term forestry measurements makes it difficult to quantify regional changes in fuel loads over the past century.

Background: Remotely sensed burned area products are critical to support fire modelling, policy, and management but often require further processing before use. Aim: We calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S.

Warning: This article contains terms, descriptions, and opinions used for historical context that may be culturally sensitive for some readers. Background: Understanding drivers of boreal forest dynamics supports adaptation strategies in the context of climate change. Aims: We aimed to understand how burn rates varied since the early 1700s in North American boreal forests.

The dominant command and control fire governance paradigm is proven ineffective at coping with modern wildfire challenges. In response, jurisdictions globally are calling for transformative change that will facilitate coexisting with future fires.

Streamflow often increases after fire, but the persistence of this effect and its importance to present and future regional water resources are unclear. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps for the western United States (WUS), where annual forest fire area increased by more than 1,100% during 1984 to 2020.

Indigenous land stewardship and mixed-severity fire regimes both promote landscape heterogeneity, and the relationship between them is an emerging area of research. In our study, we reconstructed the historical fire regime of Ne Sextsine, a 5900-ha dry, Douglas-fir-dominated forest in the traditional territory of the T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) in British Columbia, Canada.

After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re-evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington.

Ventenata (Ventenata dubia L.) is an invasive annual grass that has rapidly expanded its range across temperate grassland and shrub-steppe ecosystems in western North America. However, there is little published regarding its ecology, especially its relationship with fire on rangelands.

Conflict in US forest management for decades centered around balancing demands from forested ecosystems, with a rise in place-based collaborative governance at the end of the twentieth century.

Riparian forests link terrestrial and freshwater communities and therefore understanding the landscape context of fire regimes in these forests is critical to fully understanding the landscape ecology.