Climate Change and Fire

Using forests to sequester carbon in response to anthropogenically induced climate change is being considered across the globe. A recent U.S. executive order mandated that all federal agencies account for sequestration and emissions of greenhouse gases, highlighting the importance of understanding how forest carbon stocks are influenced by wildfire.

Future disruptions to fire activity will threaten ecosystems and human well-being throughout the world, yet there are few fire projections at global scales and almost none from a broad range of global climate models (GCMs).

We examined potential impacts of climate change over the next century on eight mammal species of conservation concern in western Washington State, under four warming scenarios.

During the 21st century, climate-driven changes in fire regimes will be a key agent of change in forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest (PNW).

The “pyroclimatic hypothesis” proposed by F. Biondi and colleagues provides a basis for testable expectations about climatic and other controls of fire regimes. This hypothesis asserts an a priori relationship between the occurrence of widespread fire and values of a relevant climatic index.

Plant communities on infertile soils may be relatively resistant to climatic variation if species in these communities have "stress-tolerant" functional traits that limit their ability to respond to climate.

Global climate change has the potential to affect future wildfire activity, particularly in south-western USA ponderosa pine forests that have been substantially altered by land-use practices and aggressive fire suppression.

Understanding effects of changes in ecological disturbance regimes on soil properties, and capacity of soil properties to resist disturbance, is important for assessing ecological condition.

Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management.

Comparing biosphereatmosphere carbon exchange across monsoon (warm-season rainfall) and Mediterranean (cool-season rainfall) regimes can yield information about the interaction between energy and water limitation.