Background. In forests subject to stand-replacing disturbances, conventional models of succession typically overlook early-seral stages as a simple re- organization/establishment period.
Management efforts to promote forest resiliency as climate changes have often used historical forest structure and composition to provide general guidance for fuels reduction and forest restoration treatments.
This project took advantage of pre-fire data gathered within the perimeter of Colorado’s 2002 Hayman Fire. Researchers studied the unique fire regime of Front Range ponderosa pine forests, and fire effects on understory-plant communities and American Three-toed Woodpeckers.
Active 20th century fire suppression in western US forests, and a resulting increase in stem density, is thought to account for a significant fraction of the NorthAmerican carbon sink. We compared California forest inventories from the 1930s with inventories from the 1990s to quantify changes in aboveground biomass.