Research Database
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Multi-scale assessment of wildfire use on carbon stocks in the Sierra Nevada, CA
Year: 2025
BackgroundThe active use of wildfire to meet forest management objectives is an important tool to increase the scale of forest restoration in dry, historically frequent-fire forests. While there are many benefits of reintroducing fire to these forests, the impact of wildland fire use policies in frequent-fire forests on aboveground carbon stocks has not yet been studied. In this study, we begin to fill this knowledge gap by assessing how fire frequency and severity affected aboveground carbon dynamics in two basins in the Sierra Nevada with a history of wildfire use over the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Frequent, heterogenous fire supports a forest owl assemblage
Year: 2025
Fire shapes biodiversity in many forested ecosystems, but historical management practices and anthropogenic climate change have led to larger, more severe fires that threaten many animal species where such disturbances do not occur naturally. As predators, owls can play important ecological roles in biological communities, but how changing fire regimes affect individual species and species assemblages is largely unknown. Here, we examined the impact of fire severity, history, and configuration over the past 35 years on an assemblage of six forest owl species in the Sierra Nevada, California,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severity of a megafire reduced by interactions of wildland fire suppression operations and previous burns
Year: 2024
Burned area and proportion of high severity fire have been increasing in the western USA, and reducing wildfire severity with fuel treatments or other means is key for maintaining fire-prone dry forests and avoiding fire-catalyzed forest loss. Despite the unprecedented scope of firefighting operations in recent years, their contribution to patterns of wildfire severity is rarely quantified. Here we investigate how wildland fire suppression operations and past fire severity interacted to affect severity patterns of the northern third of the 374 000 ha Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in…
Publication Type: Journal Article