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.
Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century.
An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western United States remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway.
Fire frequency is changing globally and is projected to affect the global carbon cycle and climate1,2,3.
Across the globe, rising temperatures and altered precipitation patterns have caused persistent regional droughts, lengthened fire seasons, and increased the number of weather-driven extreme fire events.
The effect of topography on wildfire distribution in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of debate. We suspect the size of the study area, and the assumption fire return intervals are distributed as a Weibull distribution used in many previous studies may have obscured the real effect of topography on these fire-regulated ecosystems.
Prescribed fire is widely applied in western US forests to limit future fire severity by reducing tree density, fuels, and excessive seedlings. Repeated prescribed burning attempts to simulate historical fire regimes in frequent-fire forests, yet there is limited long-term information regarding optimal burn season and frequency.
Existing fire policy encourages the maintenance of ecosystem integrity in fire management, yet this is difficult to implement on lands managed for competing economic, human safety, and air quality concerns. We discuss a fire management approach in the mid-elevations of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, that may exemplify similar challenges in other fire-adapted regions of the western USA.
We present landscape simulation results contrasting effects of changing climates on forest vegetation and fire regimes in Yellowstone National Park, USA, by mid-21st century. We simulated potential changes to fire dynamics and forest characteristics under three future climate projections representing a range of potential future conditions using the FireBGCv2 model.
Quantifying historical fire regimes provides important information for managing contemporary forests. Historical fire frequency and severity can be estimated using several methods; each method has strengths and weaknesses and presents challenges for interpretation and verification.