Climate Change and Fire

More than 50% of water supplies in the conterminous United States originate on forestland or rangeland, and are potentially under increasing stress as a result of larger and more severe wildfires. Little is known however about the long-term impacts of fire on annual water yield, and the role of climate variability within this context.

Prescribed fire is a primary tool used to restore western forests following more than a century of fire exclusion, reducing fire hazard by removing dead and live fuels (small trees and shrubs).

Changing climate and a legacy of fire-exclusion have increased the probability of high-severity wildfire, leading to an increased risk of forest carbon loss in ponderosa pine forests in the southwestern USA.

The National Climate Change Interpretation and Education Strategy outlines a systematic approach to communicating about climate change in national parks. It draws from and complements documents such as the 2012 Call to Action and the 2014 Achieving Relevancy in Our Second Century.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing natural resource management. The disruptions it is causing require that we change how we consider conservation and resource management in order to ensure the future of habitats, species, and human communities, whether that means adopting new actions or adjusting the ways in which existing actions are implemented.

This assessment provides input to the reauthorized National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and the National Climate Assessment (NCA), and it establishes the scientific foundation needed to manage for drought resilience and adaptation.

The Available Science Assessment Project (ASAP) leads, EcoAdapt and Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, hosted a workshop during the International Association of Wildland Fire’s 5th Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference, in cooperation with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network.

The field of adaptive management has been embraced by researchers and managers in the United States as an approach to improve natural resource stewardship in the face of uncertainty and complex environmental problems. Integrating multiple knowledge sources and feedback mechanisms is an important step in this approach.

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.

Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements.