Journal Article

Historically, fire has been essential in Southwestern US forests. However, a century of fire-exclusion and changing climate created forests which are more susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Forest managers use a combination of thinning and prescribed burning to reduce forest density to help mitigate the risk of high-severity fires.

Public agencies and organizations often deliver financial assistance through cost sharing, in which recipients contribute some portion toward total costs. However, cost sharing might raise equity concerns if it reduces participation among populations with lower incomes.

Federal agencies responsible for wildland fire management face increasing needs for personnel as fire seasons lengthen and fire size continues to grow, yet federal agencies have struggled to

Extreme heat and wildfire smoke events are increasingly co-occurring in the context of climate change, especially in California. Extreme heat and wildfire smoke may have synergistic effects on population health that vary over space.

Managing landscape fire is a complex challenge because it is simultaneously necessary for, and increasingly poses a risk to, societies and ecosystems worldwide. This challenge underscores the need for transformative change in the way societies live with and manage fire.

Fuel and restoration treatments seeking to mitigate the likelihood of uncharacteristic high-severity wildfires in forests with historically frequent, low-severity fire regimes are increasingly common, but long-term treatment effects on fuels, aboveground carbon, plant community structure, ecosystem resilience, and other ecosystem attributes are understudied.

Across western North America (WNA), 20th-21st century anthropogenic warming has increased the prevalence and severity of concurrent drought and heat events, also termed hot droughts. However, the lack of independent spatial reconstructions of both soil moisture and temperature limits the potential to identify these events in the past and to place them in a long-term context.

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.

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.

Fuel treatments are commonly applied to increase resilience to wildfire in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of western North America. The long-term effects of fuel treatments on forest structure, fuel profiles (amount and configuration of fuels), and potential wildfire behavior are not well known relative to short-term effects.