Understanding the influences of forest management practices on wildfire severity is critical in fire-prone ecosystems of the western United States. Newly available geospatial data sets characterizing vegetation, fuels, topography, and burn severity offer new opportunities for studying fuel treatment effectiveness at regional to national scales.

Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically.

Where the nonnative annual grass downy brome proliferates, it has changed ecosystem processes, such as nutrient, energy, and water cycles; successional pathways; and fire regimes. The objective of this study was to develop a model that predicts the presence of downy brome in Central Oregon and to test whether high presence correlates with greater cover. Understory data from the U.S.

The costly interactions between humans and wildfires throughout California demonstrate the need to understand the relationships between them, especially in the face of a changing climate and expanding human communities.

Quantifying historical fire regimes provides important information for managing contemporary forests. Historical fire frequency and severity can be estimated using several methods; each method has strengths and weaknesses and presents challenges for interpretation and verification.

Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge, significant barriers exist for re-engaging in cultural burning.

Recent literature suggests that natural disasters such as wildfires often have the short-term effect of ‘‘bringing people together’’ while also under some circumstances generating social conflict at the local level. Conflict has been documented particularly when social relations are disembedded by nonlocal entities and there is a perceived loss of local agency.

Fire danger and potential for large fires in the United States (US) is currently indicated via several forecasted qualitative indices. However, landscape-level quantitative forecasts of the probability of a large fire are currently lacking.

The environmental effect of extreme soil heating, such as occurs with the complete combustion of large downed wood during wildfires, is a post-fire management concern to forest managers.

We conducted bird surveys in 10 of the first 11 years following a mixed-severity fire in a dry, low-elevation mixed-conifer forest in western Montana, United States.