In the last three decades, over 4.1 million hectares have burned in Arizona and New Mexico and the largest fires in documented history have occurred in the past two decades. Changes in burn severity over time, however, have not been well documented in forest and woodland ecosystems in the southwestern US.
Context Lack of quantitative observations of extent, frequency, and severity of large historical fires constrains awareness of departure of contemporary conditions from those that demonstrated resistance and resilience to frequent fire and recurring drought. Objectives Compare historical and contemporary fire and forest conditions for a dry forest landscape with few barriers to fire spread.
As wildfire activity increases in many regions of the world, it is imperative that we understand how key components of fire‐prone ecosystems respond to spatial variation in fire characteristics.
Wildland fire is a critical process in forests of the western United States (US). Variation in fire behavior, which is heavily influenced by fuel loading, terrain, weather, and vegetation type, leads to heterogeneity in fire severity across landscapes. The relative influence of these factors in driving fire severity, however, is poorly understood.
Wildfire is an important disturbance process in western North American conifer forests. To better understand forest response to fire, we used generalized additive models to analyze tree mortality and long-term (1 to 25 years post-fire) radial growth patterns of trees that survived fire across a burn severity gradient in the western Cascades of Oregon.
The rain shadow forests of the Olympic Peninsula exemplify a mixed-severity fire regime class in the midst of a highly productive landscape where spatial heterogeneity of fire severity may have significant implications for below and aboveground post-fire recovery.
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States.
Many studies have examined how fuels, topography, climate, and fire weather influence fire severity. Less is known about how different forest management practices influence fire severity in multi‐owner landscapes, despite costly and controversial suppression of wildfires that do not acknowledge ownership boundaries.
Topography, weather, and fuels are known factors driving fire behavior, but the degree to which each contributes to the spatial pattern of fire severity under different conditions remains poorly understood.
Low-severity fires that killed few canopy trees played a significant historical role in dry forests of the western USA and warrant restoration and management, but historical rates of burning remain uncertain. Past reconstructions focused on on dating fire years, not measuring historical rates of burning.