Climate Change and Fire

Cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning is a major source of summer wildfire ignition in the western United States (WUS). However, future projections of lightning are uncertain since lightning is not directly simulated by most global climate models. To address this issue, we use convolutional neural network (CNN)-based parameterizations of daily June-September CG lightning.

Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities.

Drought, wildfire, wind, insects, and pathogens can interact across space and time to shape forest ecosystems. Although subdisciplines in ecology have long studied individual disturbances, their interactions remain poorly understood, particularly under climate change. Further, inconsistent terminology used to describe these interactions compounds this gap.

Annual wildfire area in California has rapidly grown in recent decades, with increasingly negative impacts on people. The fire season is also lengthening, with an earlier onset. This trend has been hypothesized to be driven by anthropogenic warming, but it has yet to be quantitatively attributed to climate drivers.

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.

Warming temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation patterns are reducing winter snowpack and critical late-season streamflows. Here, we used two models (LANDIS-II and DHSVM) in linked simulations to evaluate the effects of wildfire and forest management scenarios on future snowpack and streamflow dynamics.

Food and fibre commodity production is fundamental to global food security and economic development. However, these commodities are vulnerable to different natural hazards.

Previous analyses identified large-scale climatic patterns contributing to greater fuel aridity as drivers of recent dramatic increases in wildfire activity throughout California. This study revisits an approach to investigate more local fire weather patterns in the northern Sierra Nevada; a region within California that has experienced exceptionally high wildfire activity recently.

Background: Lightning-caused fires have a driving influence on Canadian forests, being responsible for approximately half of all wildfires and 90% of the area burned.

Scenarios, or plausible characterizations of the future, can help natural resource stewards plan and act under uncertainty. Current methods for developing scenarios for climate change adaptation planning are often focused on exploring uncertainties in future climate, but new approaches are needed to better represent uncertainties in ecological responses.