Fire regimes structure plant communities worldwide with regional and local factors, including anthropogenic fire management, influencing fire frequency and severity.
Context In the interior Northwest, debate over restoring mixed-conifer forests after a century of fire exclusion is hampered by poor understanding of the pattern and causes of spatial variation in historical fire regimes.
Building resilience to natural disturbances is a key to managing forests for adaptation to climate change. To date, most climate adaptation guidance has focused on recommendations for frequent‐fire forests, leaving few published guidelines for forests that naturally experience infrequent, stand‐replacing wildfires.
Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century.
An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western United States remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway.
Fire frequency is changing globally and is projected to affect the global carbon cycle and climate.
Dendroecology is the science that dates tree rings to their exact calendar year of formation to study processes that influence forest ecology (e.g., Speer 2010 [1], Amoroso et al., 2017 [2]). Reconstruction of past fire regimes is a core application of dendroecology, linking fire history to population dynamics and climate effects on tree growth and survivorship.
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.
The effect of topography on wildfire distribution in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of debate. We suspect the size of the study area, and the assumption fire return intervals are distributed as a Weibull distribution used in many previous studies may have obscured the real effect of topography on these fire-regulated ecosystems.
Prescribed fire is widely applied in western US forests to limit future fire severity by reducing tree density, fuels, and excessive seedlings. Repeated prescribed burning attempts to simulate historical fire regimes in frequent-fire forests, yet there is limited long-term information regarding optimal burn season and frequency.