- Changing fire regimes are profoundly impacting ecosystems and society, requiring rapid advancement in fire-related knowledge within and across disciplines. Given the influx of new disciplines into the fire field, a lack of transparent vocabulary for the application and interpretation of fire regime attributes and fire metrics impedes the capacity to scale ecological knowledge across ecosystems and continents.
- In this article, we acknowledge there are many ways to define or measure fire metrics, but demonstrate how precision and context are important for interpreting fire…
Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 228
Fire in focus: Clarifying metrics and terminology for better ecological insight
Year: 2025
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfires will intensify in the wildland-urban interface under near-term warming
Year: 2025
Dangerous fire weather is increasing under climate change, but there is limited knowledge of how this will affect fire intensity, a critical determinant of the socioecological effects of wildfire. Here, we model relationships between satellite observations of fire radiative power (FRP) and contemporaneous fire weather index, and then we project how FRP is likely to change under near-term warming scenarios. The models project widespread growth in FRP, with increases expected across 88% of fire-prone areas worldwide under 1.5 °C warming. Projected increases in FRP were highest in the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A novel methodology to assess fuel treatment effectiveness: application to California’s forests
Year: 2025
Background. Fuel treatments are increasingly used to mitigate wildfire risks. Aims. Proposing a novel, scalable and transferable methodology, this study investigates which treatment is (more) effective at a regional scale. Methods. This research evaluates the effectiveness of fuel treatments in California forests using the Fuel Treatment Effectiveness Monitoring (FTEM) database, which provides a binary (yes/no) assessment of treatment efficacy based on a structured subjective evaluation process. Proposed methodology enables scaling up site-specific treatment outcomes to the regional…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Aspen impedes wildfire spread in southwestern United States landscapes
Year: 2025
Aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests are generally thought to impede fire spread, yet the extent of this effect is not well quantified in relation to other vegetation types. We examined the influence of aspen cover on interpolated daily fire spread rates, the relative abundance of aspen at fire perimeters versus burn interiors, and whether these relationships shifted under more fire-conducive atmospheric conditions. Our study incorporated 314 fires occurring between 2001 and 2020 in the southwestern United States and a suite of gridded vegetation, topography, and fire weather…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping Community Capacity to Reduce Vulnerability to Wildfire in Colorado, USA
Year: 2025
Communities can face significant risk from wildfire, often compounded by climate change and legacies of industrial forest management. Policies and collaborative approaches for managing wildfire risk have evolved to include greater roles and responsibilities for these communities, yet local communities often lack the capacity to plan and implement actions to reduce risk of, respond to, and recover from wildfire. In this paper, we explore spatial patterns of local capacity relative to wildfire risk across the state of Colorado, USA, with the aim of informing efforts to reduce vulnerability.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contextualizing recent increases in Canadian boreal wildfire activity: decadal burn rates still within historical variability of the two past centuries
Year: 2025
With approximately 15 million hectares burned, the 2023 wildfire season in Canada was exceptional. However, it remains unclear whether such recent increases in burned areas exceed the range of variability observed over past centuries. The objective of this study was to leverage available dendrochronological reconstructions of decadal burn rates to contextualize their recent increase within their historical variability over the past two centuries. We compared decadal burn rate reconstructions based on dendrochronological data (1800s–2023) for five large eastern and western Canadian boreal…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effect of Recent Prescribed Burning and Land Management on Wildfire Burn Severity and Smoke Emissions in the Western United States
Year: 2025
Wildfires in the western US increasingly threaten infrastructure, air quality, and public health. Prescribed (“Rx”) fire is often proposed to mitigate future wildfires, but treatments remain limited, and few studies quantify their effectiveness on recent major wildfires. We investigate the effects of Rx fire treatments on subsequent burn severity across western US ecoregions and particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions in California. Using high-resolution (30-m) satellite imagery, land management records, and fire emissions data, we employ a quasi-experimental design to compare Rx fire-treated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Air Quality Impacts of the January 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires: Insights from Public Data Sources
Year: 2025
Smoke from the Los Angeles (LA) wildfires that started on January 7, 2025 caused severe air quality impacts across the region. Government agencies released guidance on assessing personal risk, pointing to publicly available data platforms that present information from monitoring networks and smoke plume outlines. Additional satellite-based products provide supporting information during dynamic wildfire smoke events. We evaluate the regional air quality impacts of the fires through publicly available fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) observations from regulatory…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Topographic Variation in Structure of Mixed-Conifer Forests Under an Active-Fire Regime
Year: 2012
Management efforts to promote forest resiliency as climate changes have often used historical forest structure and composition to provide general guidance for fuels reduction and forest restoration treatments. However, it has been difficult to identify what stand conditions might be fire and drought resilient because historical data and reconstruction studies are generally limited to accurate estimates only of large, live tree density and composition. Other stand features such as smaller tree densities, dead wood, understory structure, regeneration, and fuel loads have been difficult to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Development of Risk Matrices for Evaluating Climatic Change Responses of Forested Habitats
Year: 2012
We present an approach to assess and compare risk from climate change among multiple species through a risk matrix, in which managers can quickly prioritize for species that need to have strategies developed, evaluated further, or watched. We base the matrix upon earlier work towards the National Climate Assessment for potential damage to infrastructures from climate change. Risk is defined here as the product of the likelihood of an event occurring and the consequences or impact of that event. In the context of species habitats, the likelihood component is related to the potential changes in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climatic, Landform, Microtopographic, and Overstory Canopy Controls of Tree Invasion in a Subalpine Meadow Landscape, Oregon Cascades, USA
Year: 2012
Tree invasions have been documented throughout Northern Hemisphere high elevation meadows, as well as globally in many grass and forb-dominated ecosystems. Tree invasions are often associated with large-scale changes in climate or disturbance regimes, but are fundamentally driven by regeneration processes influenced by interactions between climatic, topographic, and biotic factors at multiple spatial scales. The purpose of this research was to quantify spatiotemporal patterns of meadow invasion; and how climate, larger landforms, topography, and overstory trees have interactively influenced…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Impact of postfire logging on soil bacterial and fungal communities on biogeochemistry in a mixed-conifer forest in central Oregon
Year: 2012
Aims Postfire logging recoups the economic value of timber killed by wildfire, but whether such forest management activity supports or impedes forest recovery in stands differing in structure from historic conditions remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of mechanical logging after wildfire on soil bacterial and fungal communities and other measures influencing soil productivity. Methods We compared soil bacterial and fungal communities and biogeochemical responses of 1) soils compacted, and 2) soils compacted and then subsoiled, to 3) soils receiving no…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Surface fuel treatments in young, regenerating stands affect wildfire severity in a mixed conifer forest, eastside Cascade Range, Washington, USA
Year: 2012
Previous studies have debated the flammability of young regenerating stands, especially those in a matrix of mature forest, and no consensus has emerged as to whether young stands are inherently prone to high severity wildfire. This topic has recently been addressed using spatial imagery, and weak inferences were made given the scale mismatch between the coarse resolution of spatial imagery and the fine resolution of mechanisms driving fire severity. We collected empirical stand and fire-severity data from 44 regenerating stands that are interspersed in mature, mid-elevation forests in the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatio-temporal prediction of site index based on forest inventories and climate change scenarios
Year: 2012
A methodological framework is provided for the quantification of climate change effects on site index. Spatio-temporal predictions of site index are derived for six major tree species in the German state of Baden-Württemberg using simplified universal kriging (UK) based on large data sets from forest inventories and a climate sensitive site-index model. It is shown by a simulation study that, with the underlying large sample size, residual kriging using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of the mean function leads to an approximately unbiased spatial predictor. Moreover, the simulated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Delayed Phenology and Reduced Fitness Associated with Climate Change in a Wild Hibernator
Year: 2012
The most commonly reported ecological effects of climate change are shifts in phenologies, in particular of warmer spring temperatures leading to earlier timing of key events. Among animals, however, these reports have been heavily biased towards avian phenologies, whereas we still know comparatively little about other seasonal adaptations, such as mammalian hibernation. Here we show a significant delay (0.47 days per year, over a 20-year period) in the hibernation emergence date of adult females in a wild population of Columbian ground squirrels in Alberta, Canada. This finding was related…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Afternoon Rain More Likely Over Drier Soils
Year: 2012
Land surface properties, such as vegetation cover and soil moisture, influence the partitioning of radiative energy between latent and sensible heat fluxes in daytime hours. During dry periods, soil-water deficit can limit evapotranspiration, leading to warmer and drier conditions in the lower atmosphere. Soil moisture can influence the development of convective storms through such modifications of low-level atmospheric temperature and humidity, which in turn feeds back on soil moisture. Yet there is considerable uncertainty in how soil moisture affects convective storms across the world,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fluvial Response to Abrupt Global Warming at the Palaeocene/Eocene Boundary
Year: 2012
Climate strongly affects the production of sediment from mountain catchments as well as its transport and deposition within adjacent sedimentary basins. However, identifying climatic influences on basin stratigraphy is complicated by nonlinearities, feedback loops, lag times, buffering and convergence among processes within the sediment routeing system. The Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) arguably represents the most abrupt and dramatic instance of global warming in the Cenozoic era and has been proposed to be a geologic analogue for anthropogenic climate change. Here we evaluate the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Timing of carbon emissions from global forest clearance
Year: 2012
Land-use change, primarily from conventional agricultural expansion and deforestation, contributes to approximately 17% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. The fate of cleared wood and subsequent carbon storage as wood products, however, has not been consistently estimated, and is largely ignored or oversimplified by most models estimating greenhouse-gas emissions from global land-use conversion. Here, we estimate the fate of cleared wood and timing of atmospheric carbon emissions for 169 countries. We show that 30 years after forest clearance the percentage of carbon stored in wood products…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Communication of the Role of Natural Variability in Future North American Climate
Year: 2012
As climate models improve, decision-makers' expectations for accurate climate predictions are growing. Natural climate variability, however, poses inherent limits to climate predictability and the related goal of adaptation guidance in many places, as illustrated here for North America. Other locations with low natural variability show a more predictable future in which anthropogenic forcing can be more readily identified, even on small scales. We call for a more focused dialogue between scientists, policymakers and the public to improve communication and avoid raising expectations for…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Soil-mediated effects of subambient to increased carbon dioxide on grassland productivity
Year: 2012
Grasslands are structured by climate and soils, and are increasingly affected by anthropogenic changes, including rising atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. CO 2 enrichment can alter grassland ecosystem function both directly and through indirect, soil-specific effects on moisture, nitrogen availability and plant species composition, potentially leading to threshold change in ecosystem properties. Here we show that the increase in aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) with CO 2 enrichment depends strongly on soil type. We found that the ANPP-CO 2 response of grassland was 2.5× greater on…
Publication Type: Journal Article