Journal Article

Tree seedling and understory vegetation re-establishment following wildfires is fundamental to landscape recovery but highly variable, depending strongly on biophysical context at small spatial scales. Onsite regeneration surveys and monitoring have been traditionally viewed as a crucial part of sustainable forest management but can be extremely difficult and time-consuming.

Forest treatments such as prescribed burns, mastication, and thinning are widely implemented across the western USA to reduce fuels and enhance wildfire resilience. These practices also influence snow accumulation and melt, which, in turn, affect snow storage and duration.

Linear fuel treatments, Fuel Break Networks, are widely implemented in California, USA fuel types to improve firefighter safety and facilitate fire containment. Despite frequent construction, landscape scale evaluations of their effectiveness with fire modeling remain limited in this region.

Background

Soil and stream nitrate concentrations often increase after severe fire from elevated nitrogen (N) mineralization and reduced plant uptake. However, it is unclear how long these effects persist and contribute to stream N export.

Aims

Background

Debris-flow runout modeling is a valuable component of the prefire assessment of post-fire hazards. The application and benefits of runout modeling are limited by uncertainty in debris-flow volume as well as model parameters related to flow mobility.

Aims

Coniferous forests account for 78% of the western US forests and store a substantial amount of carbon. Wildfires significantly alter vegetation structure and associated forest carbon stocks.

Extreme fire weather (hot, dry, and windy conditions) has intensified globally, yet formally attributing this trend to anthropogenic climate change remains challenging.

Managing ecosystems in an era of rapid change is inherently challenging not only because of uncertainty in future climate but also due to diverse responses of ecosystems to climate. Projections of ecological transformation alongside information about plausible vegetation trajectories can help land managers explore divergent scenarios and consider how modeled outcomes match their observations.

Maps are an essential tool to inform fire governance and management. For instance, they can highlight which areas are most vulnerable to adverse fire impacts or be used to plan interventions for risk reduction and prevention. In recent years, several studies have mapped the fire management activities and the networks between the multitude of involved actors.

Climate change is reducing winter snowpack and advancing spring snowmelt across the western United States (US), interacting with El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) teleconnections that drive spatially predictable interannual fluctuations that contribute to high- or low-snow winters.