A key tenet of contemporary management in dry, fire-adapted forests of western North America is the reintroduction of a frequent and low- to moderate-severity fire regime.
Increased frequency, severity, and duration of droughts and increased wildfire severity are impacting many conifer forests globally. Reforestation in these changing disturbance regimes requires tree seedlings capable of establishing in hotter and drier climates.
In the western US, increased tree density in dry conifer forests from fire exclusion has caused tree growth declines, which is being compounded by hotter multi-year droughts. The reintroduction of frequent, low-severity wildfire reduces forest density by removing fire-intolerant trees, which can reduce competition for water and improve tree growth response to drought.
Aim: Forest disturbances are a natural ecological process, but climate and land-use change are altering disturbance regimes at an unprecedented rate, posing significant threats to biological communities and the species of concern.
Aim: Increasing aridity has driven widespread synchronous fire occurrence in recent decades across North America. The lack of historical (pre-1880) fire records limits our ability to understand long-term continental fire-climate dynamics.
Fire and drought are expected to increase in frequency and severity in temperate forests due to climate change. To evaluate whether drought increases the likelihood of post-fire tree mortality, we used a large database of tree survival and mortality from 32 years of wildland fires covering four dominant western North American conifers.
During drought, resource managers want to know when the drought will end to make informed management decisions. However, as anthropogenic climate change has intensified drought conditions, we hypothesize it has affected drought recovery.
Changing climatic conditions are increasing overstory tree mortality in forests globally. This restructuring of the distribution of biomass is making already flammable forests more combustible, posing a major challenge for managing the transition to a lower biomass state.
Increasing frequency of droughts and wildfire are sparking concerns that these compounded disturbance events are pushing forested ecosystems beyond recovery. An improved understanding of how compounded events affect tree physiology and mortality is needed given the reliance of fire management planning on accurate estimates of postfire tree mortality.