In ponderosa pine forests of western North America, wildfires are becoming more frequent and affecting larger areas, while prescribed fire is increasingly used to reduce fuels and mitigate potential wildfire severity. Both fire types leave trees that initially survive their burn injuries, but will eventually die.

US public land management agencies are faced with multiple, often conflicting objectives to meet management targets and produce a wide range of ecosystem services expected from public lands. One example is managing the growing wildfire risk to human and ecological values while meeting programmatic harvest targets for economic outputs mandated in agency budgets.

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.

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.

Ensuring adequate conifer regeneration after high severity wildfires is a common objective for ecologists and forest managers.

More than 70 years of fire suppression by federal land management agencies has interrupted fire regimes in much of the western United States. The result of missed fire cycles is a buildup of both surface and canopy fuels in many forest ecosystems, increasing the risk of severe fire.

Wildfires are increasing in frequency, severity, and size in many parts of the world. Forest fires can fundamentally affect snowpack and watershed hydrology by restructuring forest composition and structure. Topography is an important factor in snowpack accumulation and ablation as it influences exposure to solar radiation and atmospheric conditions.

The increasing frequency and severity of fire and drought events have negatively impacted the capacity and success of reforestation efforts in many dry, western U.S. forests.

High-severity, infrequent fires in forests shape landscape mosaics of stand age and structure for decades to centuries, and forest structure can vary substantially even among same-aged stands. This variability among stand structures can affect landscape-scale carbon and nitrogen cycling, wildlife habitat availability, and vulnerability to subsequent disturbances.

Fire regimes structure plant communities worldwide with regional and local factors, including anthropogenic fire management, influencing fire frequency and severity.