Research Database
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11
Characterizing post-fire delayed tree mortality with remote sensing: sizing up the elephant in the room
Year: 2024
BackgroundDespite recent advances in understanding the drivers of tree-level delayed mortality, we lack a method for mapping delayed mortality at landscape and regional scales. Consequently, the extent, magnitude, and effects of delayed mortality on post-fire landscape patterns of burn severity are unknown. We introduce a remote sensing approach for mapping delayed mortality based on post-fire decline in the normalized burn ratio (NBR). NBR decline is defined as the change in NBR between the first post-fire measurement and the minimum NBR value up to 5 years post-fire for each pixel…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing fire regimes and nuanced impacts on a critically imperiled species
Year: 2024
Wildfire activity throughout western North America is increasing which can have important consequences for species persistence. Native species have evolved disturbance-adapted traits that confer resilience to natural disturbance provided disturbances operate within their historical range of variability. This resilience can erode as disturbance regimes change and begin operating outside this range. We assessed wildfire impacts during 1987–2018 on the northern spotted owl, an imperiled species with complex relationships with late and early seral forest in the Pacific Northwest, USA. We analyzed…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire refugia are robust across Western US forested ecoregions, 1986–2021
Year: 2023
In the Western US, area burned and fire size have increased due to the influences of climate change, long-term fire suppression leading to higher fuel loads, and increased ignitions. However, evidence is less conclusive about increases in fire severity within these growing wildfire extents. Fires burn unevenly across landscapes, leaving islands of unburned or less impacted areas, known as fire refugia. Fire refugia may enhance post-fire ecosystem function and biodiversity by providing refuge to species and functioning as seed sources after fires. In this study, we evaluated whether the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Refuge-yeah or refuge-nah? Predicting locations of forest resistance and recruitment in a fiery world
Year: 2023
Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth's biota. Fire refugia—locations that are burned less frequently or severely than their surroundings—may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post-fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their value to forest ecosystem persistence, there is an urgent need to anticipate where refugia are most likely to be found and where they align with environmental conditions that support post-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions Between Fire Refugia and Climate-Environment Conditions Determine Mesic Subalpine Forest Recovery After Large and Severe Wildfires
Year: 2022
Infrequent stand-replacing wildfires are characteristic of mesic and/or cool conifer forests in western North America, where forest recovery within high-severity burn patch interiors can be slow, yet successful over long temporal periods (decades to centuries). Increasing fire frequency and high-severity burn patch size, under a warming climate, however, may challenge post-fire forest recovery, promoting landscape-level shifts in forest structure, composition, and distribution of non-forest patches. Crucial to a delay and/or impediment to this shift, fire refugia (i.e., remnant seed sources)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Where and why do conifer forests persist in refugia through multiple fire events?
Year: 2021
Changing wildfire regimes are causing rapid shifts in forests worldwide. In particular, forested landscapes that burn repeatedly in relatively quick succession may be at risk of conversion when pre-fire vegetation cannot recover between fires. Fire refugia (areas that burn less frequently or severely than the surrounding landscape) support post-fire ecosystem recovery and the persistence of vulnerable species in fire-prone landscapes. Observed and projected fire-induced forest losses highlight the need to understand where and why forests persist in refugia through multiple fires. This…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disjunct and decoupled? The persistence of a fire-sensitive conifer soecies in a historically frequent-fire landscape
Year: 2020
Local and regional species extirpations may become more common as changing climate and disturbance regimesaccelerate species’ in situ range contractions. Identifying locations that function as both climate and disturbancerefugia is critical for biodiversity conservation. Here, we investigate the persistence of a disjunct, fire-sensitiveconifer population, yellow-cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis), in the historically frequent-fire landscape of the BlueMountains in eastern Oregon, USA. We used tree rings to reconstruct multi-century fire histories, which werethen used to compare historical mean…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Influence of fire refugia spatial pattern on post-fire forest recovery in Oregon’s Blue Mountains
Year: 2019
Context Fire regimes in many dry forests of western North America are substantially different from historical conditions, and there is concern about the ability of these forests to recover following severe wildfire. Fire refugia, unburned or low-severity burned patches where trees survived fire, may serve as essential propagule sources that enable forest regeneration. Objectives To quantify the influence of fire refugia spatial pattern and other biophysical factors on the process of post-fire tree regeneration; in particular examining both the proximity and density of surrounding refugia to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contributions of fire refugia to resilient ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forest landscapes
Year: 2019
Altered fire regimes can drive major and enduring compositional shifts or losses of forest ecosystems. In western North America, ponderosa pine and dry mixed‐conifer forest types appear increasingly vulnerable to uncharacteristically extensive, high‐severity wildfire. However, unburned or only lightly impacted forest stands that persist within burn mosaics—termed fire refugia—may serve as tree seed sources and promote landscape recovery. We sampled tree regeneration along gradients of fire refugia proximity and density at 686 sites within the perimeters of 12 large wildfires that occurred…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatiotemporal patterns of unburned areas within fire perimeters in the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014
Year: 2018
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. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Refugia: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter for Global Change?
Year: 2018
Fire refugia are landscape elements that remain unburned or minimally affected by fire, thereby supporting postfire ecosystem function, biodiversity, and resilience to disturbances. Although fire refugia have been studied across continents, scales, and affected taxa, they have not been characterized systematically over space and time, which is crucial for understanding their role in facilitating resilience in the context of global change. We identify four dichotomies that delineate an overarching conceptual framework of fire refugia: unburned versus lower severity, species-specific versus…
Publication Type: Journal Article