Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 115
Trailing edge contractions common in interior western US trees under varying disturbances
Year: 2025
As climate warms, trees are expected to track their ideal climate, referred to as ‘range shifts’; however, lags in tree range shifts are currently common. Disturbance events that kill trees may help catalyse tree migrations by removing biotic competition, but can also limit regeneration by eliminating seed sources, and it is unknown whether disturbance will facilitate or inhibit tree migrations in the face of climate change. Here we use national forest inventory data to show that seedlings of 15 dominant tree species in the interior western United States occupy historically cooler areas than…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Active-fire landscapes demonstrate structural resistance to subsequent fire and drought
Year: 2025
A key tenet of contemporary management in dry, fire-adapted forests of western North America is the reintroduction of a frequent and low- to moderate-severity fire regime. Where this fire regime has been fully or partially restored, it is critical to evaluate the degree to which these landscapes demonstrate forest structural resistance (i.e., the capacity to retain intrinsic structures through time) under novel climates and disturbances. In this study, we used overlapping airborne lidar datasets spanning active-fire landscapes in the Sierra Nevada, California, to evaluate how tree densities,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Systematic Review of Trends and Methodologies in Research on the Effects of Wildfires on the Avifauna in Temperate Forests
Year: 2025
Perceptions of the relationships between forest ecosystems and wildfires have evolved. The ecological role of wildfires is now recognised as essential for maintaining the functionality of fire-adapted forests. Although research on the impact of fire on fauna has grown notably, there is a lack of consensus on its global effects due to the variable responses of faunal communities across taxa. This review provides a bibliometric synthesis of wildfires and their impact on avifauna in temperate forests. It identifies patterns and gaps in research methodologies and offers recommendations for future…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Small-scale fire refugia increase soil bacterial and fungal richness and increase community cohesion nine years after fire
Year: 2025
Small-scale variation in wildfire behavior may cause large differences in belowground bacterial and fungal communities with consequences for belowground microbial diversity, community assembly, and function. Here we combine pre-fire, active-fire, and post-wildfire measurements in a mixed-conifer forest to identify how fine-scale wildfire behavior, unburned refugia, and aboveground forest structure are associated with belowground bacterial and fungal communities nine years after wildfire. We used fine-scale mapping of small (0.9–172.6 m2) refugia to sample soil-associated burned and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Power and planning: a critical discourse analysis of tribal and non-tribal Oregon wildfire protection plans
Year: 2025
BackgroundSince the late 1800s, the US government has largely removed Indigenous fire stewardship practices from the landscape by implementing a top-down fire suppression system that criminalized traditional fire practices and denaturalized the role of fire in forested environments. A century of routine fire suppression produced dense, homogenous forests capable of sustaining high-intensity wildfire that exceeds the suppression capabilities of land management organizations in many regions, spurring federal leaders to modify management approaches. As part of this change,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Governance of Indigenous data in open earth systems science
Year: 2025
In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights? The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), convened to address this question and envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research. Using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) as an example, the EDRWG recommends actions, applicable across all phases of the data lifecycle, that recognize the sovereign rights of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A tale of two fire systems: indigenous fire stewardship in British Columbia and California
Year: 2025
BackgroundAn increasing wildfire problem in western North America has created a policy space for Indigenous fire stewardship (IFS) to mitigate wildfire. We compare how British Columbia and California have supported IFS—two jurisdictions with distinct ecosystems but similar histories of colonialism and its socio-ecological consequences. We examine how IFS is incorporated into each jurisdiction’s institutional framework, and the barriers to, and opportunities for implementation.ResultsEach jurisdiction’s approach to recognizing IFS is shaped by different…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire Research
Year: 2024
Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories. In short, our Peoples have always been data gatherers, and as this article presents, we are also fire data gatherers and stewards. Given the growing interest in fire research with Indigenous communities, there is an opportunity for guidance on data collection conducted equitably and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous pyrodiversity promotes plant diversity
Year: 2024
Pyrodiversity (temporally and spatially diverse fire histories) is thought to promote biodiversity by increasing environmental heterogeneity and replicating Indigenous fire regimes, yet studies of pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships from areas under active Indigenous fire stewardship are rare. Here, we explored whether Indigenous pyrodiversity promoted plant richness and diversity in an arid ecosystem from north-western Australia. We selected landscapes that ranged from highly pyrodiverse and under active Indigenous burning to more coarse-scale and less diverse mosaics under lightning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Budworms, beetles and wildfire: Disturbance interactions influence the likelihood of insect-caused disturbances at a subcontinental scale
Year: 2024
Irruptive forest insects are a leading biotic disturbance across temperate and boreal forests. Outbreaks of forest insects are becoming more frequent and extensive due to anthropogenic drivers (e.g. climate and land-use), perhaps increasing the likelihood that forests will experience multiple insect-caused disturbances. Across the fire-prone Douglas-fir forests of western North America, recent outbreaks of the western spruce budworm and Douglas-fir beetle have impacted large expanses of forests, with a higher degree of overlap than expected in some ecoregions. Outbreaks of both insects are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate resilience through ecocultural stewardship
Year: 2024
The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity. While there are many concepts of social and ecological resilience, the exemplar practices of Indigenous stewardship are recognized in having sustained Indigenous peoples and their countries for millennia and past climate change events. California has been at the crossroads of many of these issues, and the historic and current contributions of Indigenous peoples to addressing these provide an excellent study of ecocultural…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Stand diversity increases pine resistance and resilience to compound disturbance
Year: 2024
BackgroundDrought, fire, and insects are increasing mortality of pine species throughout the northern temperate zone as climate change progresses. Tree survival may be enhanced by forest diversity, with growth rates often higher in mixed stands, but whether tree defenses are likewise aided remains in question. We tested how forest diversity-productivity patterns relate to growth and defense over three centuries of climate change, competition, wildfire, and bark beetle attack. We used detailed census data from a fully mapped 25.6-ha forest dynamics plot in California, USA to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Boundary spanners catalyze cultural and prescribed fire in western Canada
Year: 2024
Western Canada is increasingly experiencing impactful and complex wildfire seasons. In response, there are urgent calls to implement prescribed and cultural fire as a key solution to this complex challenge. Unfortunately, there has been limited investment in individuals and organizations that can navigate this complexity and work to implement collaborative solutions across physical, cognitive, and social boundaries. In the wildfire context, these boundaries manifest as jurisdictional silos, a lack of respect for certain forms of knowledge, and a disconnect between knowledge and practice. Here…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cooperative Community Wildfire Response: Pathways to First Nations’ leadership and partnership in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2024
With the growing scale of wildfires, many First Nations are demanding a stronger role in wildfire response. Disproportionate impacts on Indigenous communities (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) in Canada are motivating these demands: although approximately 5% of the population identifies as Indigenous, about 42% of wildfire evacuation events occur communities that are more than half Indigenous. In what is now known as British Columbia, Canada, new pathways for cooperative wildfire response between First Nations and provincial agencies are emerging. Drawing from semi-structured…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Montane springs provide regeneration refugia after high-severity wildfire
Year: 2024
In the mountainous regions of the Western United States, increasing wildfire activity and climate change are putting forests at risk of regeneration failure and conversion to non-forests. During periods with unfavorable climatic conditions, locations that are suitable for post-fire tree regeneration (regeneration refugia) may be essential for forest recovery. These refugia could provide scattered islands of recovering forest from which broader forest recovery may be facilitated. Spring ecosystems provide cool and wet microsites relative to the surrounding landscape and may act as regeneration…
Publication Type: Journal Article
How bureaucracies interact with Indigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS): a conceptual framework
Year: 2024
BackgroundIndigenous Fire Stewardship (IFS) is contested within settler-colonial contexts, where its development is shaped by complex and dynamic socio-cultural, legal, and political factors. This manuscript draws from the policy sciences to sketch out a “zone of interaction” between IFS and the state’s wildfire policy system. Drawing from the strategies of bureaucracies, our goal is to illustrate the patterns in this “zone of interaction,” and to identify the implications for IFS, as well as for Indigenous Peoples and landscapes.ResultsDrawing insights from the Australian and Canadian…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Distribution of Tree Biomass Carbon within the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest, a Disproportionally Carbon Dense Forest
Year: 2024
Spatially explicit global estimates of forest carbon storage are typically coarsely scaled. While useful, these estimates do not account for the variability and distribution of carbon at management scales. We asked how climate, topography, and disturbance regimes interact across and within geopolitical boundaries to influence tree biomass carbon, using the perhumid region of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest, an infrequently disturbed carbon dense landscape, as a test case. We leveraged permanent sample plots in southeast Alaska and coastal British Columbia and used multiple quantile…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear
Year: 2024
Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Carbon, climate, and natural disturbance: a review of mechanisms, challenges, and tools for understanding forest carbon stability in an uncertain future
Year: 2024
In this review, we discuss current research on forest carbon risk from natural disturbance under climate change for the United States, with emphasis on advancements in analytical mapping and modeling tools that have potential to drive research for managing future long-term stability of forest carbon. As a natural mechanism for carbon storage, forests are a critical component of meeting climate mitigation strategies designed to combat anthropogenic emissions. Forests consist of long-lived organisms (trees) that can store carbon for centuries or more. However, trees have finite lifespans, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Indigenous Peoples' Rights Discourse: Toward Hemispheric Indigenous Climate and Environmental Justice
Year: 2024
In the face of global climate change, Indigenous communities around the world have increasingly gained recognition as significant actors in the fight for environmental justice and sustainability. This paper endeavors to explore the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews and environmental stewardship, while gesturing toward international policies rooted in both state apparatus and in indigenous grassroots efforts. Collectively, this work seeks to illuminate the action, implementation, and community work done by Indigenous Peoples that Hernandez [Binnizá & Maya Ch’orti’] (2022…
Publication Type: Journal Article