Fire Effects and Fire Ecology

Prescribed burning is a key management strategy within fire-adapted systems, and improved monitoring approaches are needed to evaluate its effectiveness in achieving social-ecological outcomes. Remote sensing provides opportunities to analyse the impacts of prescribed burning, yet a comprehensive understanding of the applications of remote sensing for prescribed burn research is lacking.

Spatially explicit global estimates of forest carbon storage are typically coarsely scaled. While useful, these estimates do not account for the variability and distribution of carbon at management scales.

The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate.

Fire ecology is a complex discipline that can only be understood by integrating biological, physical, and social sciences. The science of fire ecology explores wildland fire’s mechanisms and effects across all scales of time and space.

Background

Climate  change  is  altering  fire  regimes  and  post-fire  conditions,  contributing  to  relatively  rapid  transformation  of  landscapes  across  the  western  US.

Conifer forest resilience may be threatened by increasing wildfire activity and compound disturbances in western North America. Fire refugia enhance forest resilience, yet may decline over time due to delayed mortality—a process that remains poorly understood at landscape and regional scales.

The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity. Spanning from late April to early November and extending across much of the forested regions of Canada, the season resulted in a record-breaking total area burned of approximately 15 million hectares, over seven times the historic national annual average.

Anthropogenic influences are altering fire regimes worldwide, resulting in an increase in the size and severity of wildfires. Simultaneously, throughout western North America, there is increasing recognition of the important role of Indigenous fire stewardship in shaping historical fire regimes and fire-adapted ecosystems.

Overnight fires are emerging in North America with previously unknown drivers and implications.