modeling

Fire is a driving force in the North American landscape and predicting post-fire tree mortality is vital to land management. Post-fire tree mortality can have substantial economic and social impacts, and natural resource managers need reliable predictive methods to anticipate potential mortality following fire events.

Wild and prescribed fire-induced injury to forest trees can produce immediate or delayed tree mortality but fire-injured trees can also survive. Land managers use logistic regression models that incorporate tree-injury variables to discriminate between fatally injured trees and those that will survive. We used data from 4024 ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl.

Restoration treatments in dry forests of the western US often attempt silvicultural practices to restore the historical characteristics of forest structure and fire behavior.

Wildfire area is predicted to increase with global warming. Empirical statistical models and process-based simulations agree almost universally. The key relationship for this unanimity, observed at multiple spatial and temporal scales, is between drought and fire.

The area burned annually by wildfires is expected to increase worldwide due to climate change. Burned areas increase soil erosion rates within watersheds, which can increase sedimentation in downstream rivers and reservoirs. However, which watersheds will be impacted by future wildfires is largely unknown.

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.

Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity.

We present a case study of the Las Conchas Fire (2011) to explore the role of previously burned areas (wildfires and prescribed fires) on suppression effectiveness and avoided exposure.

Projecting the response of forests to changing climate requires understanding how biotic and abiotic controls on tree growth will change over time. As temperature and interannual precipitation variability increase, the overall forest response is likely to be influenced by species-specific responses to changing climate.

Increased forest fire activity across the western continental United States (US) in recent decades has likely been enabled by a number of factors, including the legacy of fire suppression and human settlement, natural climate variability, and human-caused climate change.