Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 149
Fire-driven animal evolution in the Pyrocene
Year: 2023
Fire regimes are a major agent of evolution in terrestrial animals. Changing fire regimes and the capacity for rapid evolution in wild animal populations suggests the potential for rapid, fire-driven adaptive animal evolution in the Pyrocene. Fire drives multiple modes of evolutionary change, including stabilizing, directional, disruptive, and fluctuating selection, and can strongly influence gene flow and genetic drift. Ongoing and future research in fire-driven animal evolution will benefit from further development of generalizable hypotheses, studies conducted in highly responsive taxa,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Less fuel for the next fire? Short-interval fire delays forest recovery and interacting drivers amplify effects
Year: 2023
As 21st-century climate and disturbance dynamics depart from historic baselines, ecosystem resilience is uncertain. Multiple drivers are changing simultaneously, and interactions among drivers could amplify ecosystem vulnerability to change. Subalpine forests in Greater Yellowstone (Northern Rocky Mountains, USA) were historically resilient to infrequent (100–300 year), severe fire. We sampled paired short-interval (<30-year) and long-interval (>125-year) post-fire plots most recently burned between 1988 and 2018 to address two questions: (1) How do short-interval fire, climate,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evidence for multi-decadal fuel buildup in a large California wildfire from smoke radiocarbon measurements
Year: 2023
In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in annual area burned in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. This rise in fire activity has prompted the need to understand how historical forest management practices affect fuel composition and emissions. Here we examined the total carbon (TC) concentration and radiocarbon abundance (Δ14C) of particulate matter (PM) emitted by the KNP Complex Fire, which occurred during California's 2021 wildfire season and affected several groves of giant sequoia trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. During a 26 h sampling period, we measured…
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
The century-long shadow of fire exclusion: Historical data reveal early and lasting effects of fire regime change on contemporary forest composition
Year: 2023
Historical logging practices and fire exclusion have reduced the proportion of pine in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States. To better understand pine’s decline, we investigate the impact of historical logging on the tree regeneration layer and subsequent stand development over almost a century of fire exclusion. We use a unique dataset derived from contemporary (∼2016) remeasurement of 440 historical quadrats (∼4m2) in the central Sierra Nevada, California, in which overstory trees, tree regeneration, and microsite conditions were measured and mapped both before and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The eco-evolutionary role of fire in shaping terrestrial ecosystems
Year: 2023
1. Fire is an inherently evolutionary process, even though much more emphasis has been given to ecological responses of plants and their associated communities to fire. 2. Here, we synthesize contributions to a Special Feature entitled ‘Fire as a dynamic ecological and evolutionary force’ and place them in a broader context of fire research. Topics covered in this Special Feature include a perspective on the im-pacts of novel fire regimes on differential forest mortality, discussions on new ap-proaches to investigate vegetation-fire feedbacks and resulting plant syndromes,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High-severity burned area and proportion exceed historic conditions in Sierra Nevada, California, and adjacent ranges
Year: 2023
Although fire is a fundamental ecological process in western North American forests, climate warming and accumulating forest fuels due to fire suppression have led to wildfires that burn at high severity across larger fractions of their footprint than were historically typical. These trends have spiked upwards in recent years and are particularly pronounced in the Sierra Nevada–Southern Cascades ecoregion of California, USA, and neighboring states. We assessed annual area burned (AAB) and percentage of area burned at high and low-to-moderate severity for seven major forest types in this…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social drivers of vulnerability to wildfire disasters: A review of the literature
Year: 2023
The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population’s or…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Consistent spatial scaling of high-severity wildfire can inform expected future patterns of burn severity
Year: 2023
Increasing wildfire activity in forests worldwide has driven urgency in understanding current and future fire regimes. Spatial patterns of area burned at high severity strongly shape forest resilience and constitute a key dimension of fire regimes, yet remain difficult to predict. To characterize the range of burn severity patterns expected within contemporary fire regimes, we quantified scaling relationships relating fire size to patterns of burn severity. Using 1615 fires occurring across the Northwest United States between 1985 and 2020, we evaluated scaling relationships within fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exceptional variability in historical fire regimes across a western Cascades landscape, Oregon, USA
Year: 2023
Detailed information about the historical range of variability in wildfire activity informs adaptation to future climate and disturbance regimes. Here, we describe one of the first annually resolved reconstructions of historical (1500–1900 ce) fire occurrence in coast Douglas-fir dominated forests of the west slope of the Cascade Range in western Oregon. Mean fire return intervals (MFRIs) across 16 sites within our study area ranged from 6 to 165 years. Variability in MFRIs was strongly associated with average maximum summer vapor pressure deficit. Fire occurred infrequently in Douglas-fir…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
Widespread exposure to altered fire regimes under 2 °C warming is projected to transform conifer forests of the Western United States
Year: 2023
Changes in wildfire frequency and severity are altering conifer forests and pose threats to biodiversity and natural climate solutions. Where and when feedbacks between vegetation and fire could mediate forest transformation are unresolved. Here, for the western United States, we used climate analogs to measure exposure to fire-regime change; quantified the direction and spatial distribution of changes in burn severity; and intersected exposure with fire-resistance trait data. We measured exposure as multivariate dissimilarities between contemporary distributions of fire frequency, burn…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The interactional approach to adaptive capacity: Researching adaptation in socially diverse, wildfire prone communities
Year: 2022
This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of advancements developed while extending the theory to promote collective action for wildfire. Extensions of Wilkinson’s work include organizing a range of adaptive capacity characteristics that help document differential community capacity for wildfire adaptation, introduction of “community archetypes”…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The contribution of Indigenous stewardship to an historical mixed-severity fire regime in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous land stewardship and mixed-severity fire regimes both promote landscape heterogeneity, and the relationship between them is an emerging area of research. In our study, we reconstructed the historical fire regime of Ne Sextsine, a 5900-ha dry, Douglas-fir-dominated forest in the traditional territory of the T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) in British Columbia, Canada. Between 1550 and 1982 CE, we found median fire intervals of 18 years at the plot-level and 4 years at the study site-level. Ne Sextsine was characterized by an historical mixed-severity fire regime, dominated by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme Winds Alter Influence of Fuels and Topography on Megafire Burn Severity in Seasonal Temperate Rainforests under Record Fuel Aridity
Year: 2022
Nearly 0.8 million hectares of land were burned in the North American Pacific Northwest (PNW) over two weeks under record-breaking fuel aridity and winds during the extraordinary 2020 fire season, representing a rare example of megafires in forests west of the Cascade Mountains. We quantified the relative influence of weather, vegetation, and topography on patterns of high burn severity (>75% tree mortality) among five synchronous megafires in the western Cascade Mountains. Despite the conventional wisdom in climate-limited fire regimes that regional drivers (e.g., extreme aridity, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community Engagement With Proactive Wildfire Management in British Columbia, Canada: Perceptions, Preferences, and Barriers to Action
Year: 2022
Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. These growing impacts have prompted a paradigm shift toward proactive wildfire management that prioritizes prevention and preparedness instead of response. Despite this shift, many communities remain unprepared for wildfires in the WUI due to diverse individual and social-political factors influencing engagement with proactive management approaches. The catastrophic fire seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2021 in British Columbia (BC), Canada, highlighted just how vulnerable communities continue to be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cultivating Collaborative Resilience to Social and Ecological Change: An Assessment of Adaptive Capacity, Actions, and Barriers Among Collaborative Forest Restoration Groups in the United States
Year: 2022
Collaboration is increasingly emphasized as a tool to realize national-level policy goals in public lands management. Yet, collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are nested within traditional bureaucracies and are affected by internal and external disruptions. The extent to which CGRs adapt and remain resilient to these disruptions remains under-explored. Here, we distill insights from an assessment of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) projects and other CGRs. We asked (1) how do CGRs adapt to disruptions? and (2) what barriers constrained CGR resilience? Our…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governing wildfires: toward a systematic analytical framework
Year: 2022
Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management. We engage our findings with the wider governance literature to unlock new thinking on wildfires as a process and outcome. This comparative approach enables us to propose a novel framework for analyzing wildfire governance based on four pillars: (1) actor participation in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Priorities and Effectiveness in Wildfire Management: Evidence from Fire Spread in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Costs of fighting wildfires have increased substantially over the past several decades. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of wildfire suppression or how wildfire incident managers prioritize resources threatened within a wildfire incident. We investigate the determinants of wildfire suppression effort using a novel empirical strategy comparing over 1,400 historical fire perimeters to the spatial distribution of assets at risk. We find that fires are more likely to stop spreading as they approach homes, particularly when homes are of greater value. This effect persists…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human Fire Use and Management: A Global Database of Anthropogenic Fire Impacts for Modelling
Year: 2022
Human use and management of fire in landscapes have a long history and vary globally in purpose and impact. Existing local research on how people use and manage fire is fragmented across multiple disciplines and is diverse in methods of data collection and analysis. If progress is to be made on systematic understanding of human fire use and management globally, so that it might be better represented in dynamic global vegetation models, for example, we need improved synthesis of existing local research and literature. The database of anthropogenic fire impacts (DAFI) presented here is a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governing ecosystem adaptation: An investigation of adaptive capacity within environmental governance networks
Year: 2022
Climate change is impacting ecosystems in dynamic ways. In order to mitigate the risks brought about by these ecosystem changes, ecosystem management, which has historically focused on preservation and preventing change, must now be much more flexible and responsive. The capacity to adapt management approaches to current and future climate conditions is fundamentally a function of access to resources and social capital, both of which are considerably influenced by underlying socio-political conditions. While a growing body of research addresses the adaptive capacity of individuals,…
Publication Type: Journal Article