Context Addressing ecosystem degradation in the Anthropocene will require ecological restoration across large spatial extents. Identifying areas where natural regeneration will occur without direct resource investment will improve scalability of restoration actions.
Because of past land use changes and changing climate, forests are moving outside of their historical range of variation. As fires become more severe, forest managers are searching for strategies that can restore forest health and reduce fire risk. However, management activities are only one part of a suite of disturbance vectors that shape forest conditions.
Knowledge of how ecocultural landscapes co-evolved, how they were shaped and maintained by local people, and what processes disturbed the landscape should inform the planning, execution, and significance of restoration projects. Indigenous stewardship has resulted in legacies of diverse and productive ecocultural environments.
Mechanical forest thinning treatments are implemented across the western United States (US) to improve forest health and reduce hazardous fuels. However, the main challenge in thinning operations is low financial feasibility.
In the western US, wildfires are modifying the structure, composition, and patterns of forested landscapes at ratesthat far exceed mechanical thinning and prescribed fire treatments. There are conflicting narratives as to whetherthese wildfires are restoring landscape resilience to future climate and wildfires.
Purpose of Review: Increasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. Climate change and more than a century of fire exclusion and wildfire suppression have led to contemporary wildfires with more severe environmental impacts and human smoke exposure.
Active forest restoration programs on western US national forests face multiple challenges to meet their broad ecological goals while designing projects that generate sufficient revenue to build and maintain private forest management capacity needed to expand the scale and scope of treatments.
Over the past several decades, the management of historically frequent-fire forests in the western United States has received significant attention due to the linked ecological and social risks posed by the increased occurrence of large, contiguous patches of high-severity fire.
Wildfire is a keystone ecological process in many forests worldwide, but fire exclusion and suppression have driven profound shifts in forest structure (e.g., increased density, canopy cover, biomass) that have contributed to increases in large, high-severity fire in many seasonally dry forests and woodlands of the western United States.
Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and effects of cultural burning in this region within an ecosystem services framework.