Widespread impacts of landscape fire on ecosystems, societies, and the climate system itself have heightened the need to understand the potential future trajectory of fire under continued climate change. However, the complexity of fire makes climate change impact assessment challenging.
Mature and old-growth forests (MOG) provide essential ecosystem services, yet they face increasing threats. Currently, high-intensity, high-severity wildfires are the main driver for loss of MOG on federally managed forests across the United States. Quantifying MOG forests with greatest exposure to stand-replacing wildfires provides essential information for land managers.
Background
Prevailing American wildland fire modelling systems fail to predict fire growth in urban areas due to the absence of burnable urban fuels.
Aims
This research aims to identify fuel models that optimise fire spread in urban areas relative to a hypothetical fire spread model derived from observations of recent urban fires.
Increasing wildfires are causing global concerns about ecosystem functioning and services. Although some wildfires are caused by natural ignitions, it is also important to understand how human ignitions and human-related factors can contribute to wildfires.
Wildfire’s destruction of homes is an increasingly serious global problem. Research indicates that characterizing home hardening and defensible space at the individual structure level may reduce loss through enriched understanding of structure susceptibility in the built environment. However, improved data and methods are required to accurately characterize these features at scale.
Fuel-reduction and restoration treatments (“treatments”) are conducted extensively in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of interior western North America (“dry forests”) to reduce potential for uncharacteristically severe wildfire.
Perceptions of the relationships between forest ecosystems and wildfires have evolved. The ecological role of wildfires is now recognised as essential for maintaining the functionality of fire-adapted forests. Although research on the impact of fire on fauna has grown notably, there is a lack of consensus on its global effects due to the variable responses of faunal communities across taxa.
Scenarios, or plausible characterizations of the future, can help natural resource stewards plan and act under uncertainty. Current methods for developing scenarios for climate change adaptation planning are often focused on exploring uncertainties in future climate, but new approaches are needed to better represent uncertainties in ecological responses.