Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 191
Complexities in post-wildfire governance: lessons from Colorado’s 2020 wildfires
Year: 2025
Background: The increasing size and severity of western U.S. wildfires in recent years has generated greater attention towards post-wildfire response and recovery. Post-fire governance requires coordinating response and recovery capacities across jurisdictions, landscapes, and time scales. The presence of wildfire on federal public lands necessitates federal agency involvement in both suppression and recovery efforts, and program coordination with lower levels of government and non-governmental organizations. Using semi-structured interviews, we investigated experiences of leaders across the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Decreasing landscape carbon storage in western US forests with 2 °C of warming
Year: 2025
Changing climate is altering the amount of carbon that can be sustained in forest ecosystems. Increasing heat and drought is already causing increased mortality and decreased regeneration in some locations. These changes have implications for landscape carbon storage with ongoing climate change. We used a climate analogs approach to project aboveground forest carbon density under +2 °C warming above pre-industrial climate for western US forests. We calculated analogs for current climate and under +2 °C warming and associated carbon density for each time period. We found that in most…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire delayed tree mortality in mesic coniferous forests reduces fire refugia and seed sources
Year: 2025
Context: Ecological functions provided by fire refugia are critical for supporting conifer forest resiliency under increased fire activity across the western United States. The spatial distribution and persistence of fire refugia over time are uncertain as fire-injured trees continue to die over subsequent years post-fire.Objectives: We examined how post-fire delayed tree mortality affects the spatial distribution and attributes of fire refugia at patch and landscape scales following high-severity wildfires.Methods: To explore changes in fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Insights provided by a new searchable repository for post-fire hydrology studies and associated data
Year: 2025
BackgroundAs the number and size of wildfires increase worldwide, so too has the realization that wildfires and hydrology are closely linked. The field of post-fire hydrology has been growing in recent decades, but the resultant datasets and studies are spread across disparate repositories and can be difficult for researchers and decision-makers to access.ResultsTo help address this issue, we have created searchable lists of literature, datasets, and models related to post-fire hydrology which can be accessed—and added to—by any interested members of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Quantifying Western US tree carbon stocks and sequestration from fires
Year: 2025
Background: Forest ecosystems function as the largest terrestrial carbon sink globally. In the Western US, fires play a crucial role in modifying forest carbon storage, sequestration capacity, and the transfer of carbon from live to dead carbon pools. We utilized remeasurements of more than 700,000 trees from 24,000 locations from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) and incorporated supplementary information on wildfires from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity dataset. These datasets allowed us to develop models that examined the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Short-term impacts of operational fuel treatments on modelled fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2025
Background: In response to increasing risk of extreme wildfire across western North America, forest managers are proactively implementing fuel treatments.Aims: We assessed the efficacy of alternative combinations of thinning, pruning and residue fuel management to mitigate potential fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of interior British Columbia, Canada.Methods: Across five community forests, we measured stand attributes before and after fuel treatments in 2021 and 2022, then modelled fire behaviour and effects using the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping Delayed Canopy Loss and Durable Fire Refugia for the 2020 Wildfires in Washington State Using Multiple Sensors
Year: 2025
Fire refugia are unburned and low severity patches within wildfires that contribute heterogeneity that is important to retaining biodiversity and regenerating forest following fire. With increasingly intense and frequent wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, fire refugia are important for re-establishing populations sensitive to fire and maintaining resilience to future disturbances. Mapping fire refugia and delayed canopy loss is useful for understanding patterns in their distribution. The increasing abundance of satellite data and advanced analysis platforms offer the potential to map fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Long-term soil nutrient and understory plant responses to post-fire rehabilitation in a lodgepole pine forest
Year: 2025
Wildfires and other disturbances play a fundamental role in regenerating lodgepole pine forests. Though severe, stand-replacing fires are typical of this ecosystem, they can have dramatic impacts on soil properties and biogeochemical processes that influence the rate and composition of vegetation recovery. Organic soil amendments are often applied to manage post-fire erosion, but they can also improve soil moisture and nutrient retention and potentially alter the trajectory of post-fire revegetation. We compared change in soil nutrients, microbial communities, and understory plant cover and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing wildfire frequency decreases carbon storage and leads to regeneration failure in Alaskan boreal forests
Year: 2025
BackgroundThe increasing size, severity, and frequency of wildfires is one of the most rapid ways climate warming could alter the structure and function of high-latitude ecosystems. Historically, boreal forests in western North America had fire return intervals (FRI) of 70–130 years, but shortened FRIs are becoming increasingly common under extreme weather conditions. Here, we quantified pre-fire and post-fire C pools and C losses and assessed post-fire seedling regeneration in long (> 70 years), intermediate (30–70 years), and short (< 30 years) FRIs, and triple (three fires in < 70…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Planted seedling regeneration using gap-based silviculture without herbicide in a wildfire-impacted forest of the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2025
Gap-based silviculture, which we define as the creation and maintenance of multi-aged stands through the periodic harvesting of discrete canopy gaps, provides a potential mechanism for converting previously high-graded stands into more heterogeneous, multi-aged structures. An advantage of small canopy gaps, relative to even-aged regeneration methods, is their potential to suppress shrub competition while allowing seedling growth without the use of herbicides or other means of managing shrub competition. While this idea has been proposed in principle, it has not been tested. The objective of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Near real-time indicators of burn severity in the western U.S. from active fire tracking
Year: 2025
BackgroundTimely information on wildfire burn severity is critical to assess and mitigate potential post-fire impacts on soils, vegetation, and hillslope stability. Tracking individual fire spread and intensity using satellite active fire data provides a pathway to near real-time (NRT) information. Here, we generated a large database (n = 2177) of wildfire events in the western United States (U.S.) between 2012 and 2021 using active fire detections from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Going slow to go fast: landscape designs to achieve multiple benefits
Year: 2025
Introduction: Growing concerns about fire across the western United States, and commensurate emphasis on treating expansive areas over the next 2 decades, have created a need to develop tools for managers to assess management benefits and impacts across spatial scales. We modeled outcomes associated with two common forest management objectives: fire risk reduction (fire), and enhancing multiple resource benefits (ecosystem resilience).Method: We evaluated the compatibility of these two objectives across ca. 1-million ha in the central Sierra Nevada,…
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
Mobile radar provides insights into hydrologic responses in burn areas
Year: 2025
Background. Wildfires often occur in mountainous terrain, regions that pose substantial challenges to operational meteorological and hydrologic observing networks. Aims. A mobile, postfire hydrometeorological observatory comprising remote-sensing and in situ instrumentation was developed and deployed in a burnt area to provide unique insights into rainfall-induced post-fire hazards. Methods. Mobile radar-based rainfall estimates were produced throughout the burn area at 75-m resolution and compared with rain gauge accumulations and basin response variables. Key results. The mobile radar was…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Effects of long-term ecological research and cognitive biases on the evaluation of scientific information by public land managers in Oregon and Washington, USA
Year: 2025
Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access. Barriers, such as paywalls, insufficient capacity, and information overload play an important role in determining what scientific information managers have access and attend to. Additionally, characteristics of managers themselves also influence what scientific information they prioritize and implement. Specific factors likely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire gives avian populations a rapid and enduring boost in protected forests of California
Year: 2025
BackgroundFire can impact ecosystems and species over both short and long timeframes, resulting in pervasive impacts on the structure of avian communities. While recent research has highlighted the strong impact of fire on bird communities in the short term, there remains a need for understanding long-term population processes following fire, particularly in forested landscapes that are burning more frequently than in the past century. We analyzed avian response to fire using point-count data from 1999–2019 within national parks of the Sierra Nevada Inventory & Monitoring Network,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-fire structure drives variability in post-fire aboveground carbon and fuel profiles in wet temperate forests
Year: 2025
Biological legacies (i.e., materials that persist following disturbance; “legacies”) shape ecosystem functioning and feedbacks to future disturbances, yet how legacies are driven by pre-disturbance ecosystem state and disturbance severity is poorly understood—especially in ecosystems influenced by infrequent and severe disturbances. Focusing on wet temperate forests as an archetype of these ecosystems, we characterized live and dead aboveground biomass 2–5 years post-fire in western Washington and northwestern Oregon, USA, to ask: How do pre-fire stand age (i.e., pre-disturbance ecosystem…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A cellular necrosis process model for estimating conifer crown scorch
Year: 2025
Fire-caused tree mortality has major impacts on forest ecosystems. One primary cause of post-fire tree mortality in non-resprouting species is crown scorch, the percentage of foliage in a crown that is killed by heat. Despite its importance, the heat required to kill foliage is not well-understood. We used the “lag” model to describe time- and temperature-dependent leaf cell necrosis as a method of predicting leaf scorch. The lag model includes two rate parameters that describe 1) the process of cells accumulating non-lethal damage, and 2) damage becoming lethal to the cell. To parameterize…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Offsetting the noise: a framework for applying phenological offset corrections in remotely sensed burn severity assessments
Year: 2025
BackgroundPhenological correction of pre- and post-fire imagery is used to improve remotely sensed burn severity evaluations. Unburned offset values standardize greenness between image pairs; however, efficacy across diverse scenarios remains underexplored.AimsWe evaluated the impact of phenological offset correction methods to support analyst decision-making across fire-prone environments.MethodsWe generated burn severity spectral index values for a dataset of Composite Burn Index (CBI) field plots across the conterminous US. The…
Publication Type: Journal Article