Fire Effects and Fire Ecology

In the context of ongoing climatic warming, forest landscapes face increasing risk of conversion to non‐forest vegetation through alteration of their fire regimes and their post‐fire recovery dynamics. However, this pressure could be amplified or dampened, depending on how fire‐driven changes to vegetation feed back to alter the extent or behaviour of subsequent fires.

Massive tree mortality has occurred rapidly in frequent-fire-adapted forests of the Sierra Nevada, California. This mortality is a product of acute drought compounded by the long-established removal of a key ecosystem process: frequent, low- to moderate-intensity fire.

Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances.

Landsat-based fire severity maps have limited ecological resolution, which can hinder assessments of change to specific resources. Therefore, we evaluated the use of pre- and post-fire LiDAR, and combined LiDAR with Landsat-based relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR) estimates, to increase the accuracy and resolution of basal area mortality estimation.

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.

Understanding the implications of shifts in disturbance regimes for plants and pollinators is essential for successful land management.

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

Context In the interior Northwest, debate over restoring mixed-conifer forests after a century of fire exclusion is hampered by poor understanding of the pattern and causes of spatial variation in historical fire regimes.

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.

Wildfire ecosystems are thought to be self‐regulated through pattern–process interactions between ignition frequency and location, and patterns of burned and recovering vegetation. Yet, recent increases in the frequency of large wildfires call into question the application of self‐organization theory to landscape resilience.