Mixed-Conifer Management

Background In California’s mixed-conifer forests, fuel reduction treatments can successfully reduce fire severity, bolster forest resilience, and make lasting changes in forest structure. However, current understanding of the duration of treatment effectiveness is lacking robust empirical evidence.

Frequent-fire forests were once heterogeneous at multiple spatial scales, which contributed to their resilience to severe fire. While many studies have characterized historical spatial patterns in frequent-fire forests, fewer studies have investigated their temporal dynamics.

Although fire is a fundamental ecological process in western North American forests, climate warming and accumulating forest fuels due to fire suppression have led to wildfires that burn at high severity across larger fractions of their footprint than were historically typical.

Ecological disturbance regimes across the globe are being altered via direct and indirect human influences. Biodiversity loss at multiple scales can be a direct outcome of these shifts.

Highlights • Mortality of canopy trees was similar between spring and fall prescribed burns in 13-14 year old stands • Fall burns consumed more surface fuel without substantially high levels of canopy damage • Pre-fire pruning Pinus lambertiana and Calocecrus decurrens trees did not clearly reduce tree damage • Gap-based silviculture and prescribed fire can be merged to meet broad ecological go

Wildfires were a frequent source of dis-turbance in forests of the Western United States prior to Euro-American settle-ment. Following a series of catastrophic wildfires in the Northern Rockies in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a broad wildfire suppression policy that has resulted in forests thick with small trees.

The increasing amount of high-severity wildfire in historical low and mixed-severity fire regimes in western US forests has created a need to better understand the ecological effects of different post fire management approaches.

During the past century, systematic wildfire suppression has decreased fire frequency and increased fire severity in the western United States of America.

Context Fire regimes in many dry forests of western North America are substantially different from historical conditions, and there is concern about the ability of these forests to recover following severe wildfire. Fire refugia, unburned or low-severity burned patches where trees survived fire, may serve as essential propagule sources that enable forest regeneration.

Ensuring adequate conifer regeneration after high severity wildfires is a common objective for ecologists and forest managers.