Journal Article

Background

Background

Restoring a low-intensity, frequent-fire regime in fire-prone forests offers a promising natural climate solution. Management interventions that include prescribed fire and/or mechanical treatments have effectively reduced fire hazards in the Western United States, yet concerns remain regarding their impact on forest carbon storage.

Climate change is impacting wildfires in the contiguous United States; thus, projections of fire danger under climate change have the potential to inform responses to changing wildfire risks.

Changing climate is altering the amount of carbon that can be sustained in forest ecosystems. Increasing heat and drought is already causing increased mortality and decreased regeneration in some locations. These changes have implications for landscape carbon storage with ongoing climate change.

A key tenet of contemporary management in dry, fire-adapted forests of western North America is the reintroduction of a frequent and low- to moderate-severity fire regime.

Background

Wild and intentionally ignited fires are not new to North American landscapes or to the Indigenous cultures whose ancestral places encompass them. For millennia, Indigenous fire stewardship has been regionally and locally distributed across North American ecosystems.

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.

Background