Journal Article

During active fire incidents, decisions regarding where and how to safely and effectively deploy resources to meet management objectives are often made under rapidly evolving conditions, with limited time to assess management strategies or for development of backup plans if initial efforts prove unsuccessful.

Characterising the impacts of wildland fire and fire suppression is critical information for fire management decision-making.

Measuring post-fire effects at landscape scales is critical to an ecological understanding of wildfire effects.

Artemisia tridentata ssp. vaseyana ecosystems evolved with periodic fire, but invasive grasses, conifer encroachment, fire suppression, and climate change have resulted in altered fire regimes and plant communities. Post-fire increases in invasive annual grasses such as Bromus tectorum and reductions in native vegetation are common across the sagebrush steppe.

A small but growing number of watershed investment programs in the western United States focus on wildfire risk reduction to municipal water supplies.

Forest disturbance regimes are beginning to show evidence of climate-mediated changes, such as increasing severity of droughts and insect outbreaks. We review the major insects and pathogens affecting the disturbance regime for coastal Douglas-fir forests in western Oregon and Washington State, USA, and ask how future climate changes may influence their role in disturbance ecology.

Management in fire-prone ecosystems relies widely upon application of prescribed fire and/or fire-surrogate (e.g., forest thinning) treatments to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function. The literature suggests fire and mechanical treatments proved more variable in their effects on understory vegetation as compared to their effects on stand structure.

Across the globe, rising temperatures and altered precipitation patterns have caused persistent regional droughts, lengthened fire seasons, and increased the number of weather-driven extreme fire events.

Fire is a driving force in the North American landscape and predicting post-fire tree mortality is vital to land management. Post-fire tree mortality can have substantial economic and social impacts, and natural resource managers need reliable predictive methods to anticipate potential mortality following fire events.

The impacts of wildfires have increased in recent decades because of historical forest and fire management, a rapidly changing climate, and an increasingly populated wildland urban interface. This increasingly complex fire environment highlights the importance of developing robust tools to support risk-informed decision making.