Topography, weather, and fuels are known factors driving fire behavior, but the degree to which each contributes to the spatial pattern of fire severity under different conditions remains poorly understood.
Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover.
Low-severity fires that killed few canopy trees played a significant historical role in dry forests of the western USA and warrant restoration and management, but historical rates of burning remain uncertain. Past reconstructions focused on on dating fire years, not measuring historical rates of burning.
Prescribed burning is a primary tool for habitat restoration and management in fire-adapted grasslands. Concerns about detrimental effects of burning on butterfly populations, however, can inhibit implementation of treatments.
The proportion of fire area that experienced stand-replacing fire effects is an important attribute of individual fires and fire regimes in forests, and this metric has been used to group forest types into characteristic fire regimes.
Existing fire policy encourages the maintenance of ecosystem integrity in fire management, yet this is difficult to implement on lands managed for competing economic, human safety, and air quality concerns. We discuss a fire management approach in the mid-elevations of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, that may exemplify similar challenges in other fire-adapted regions of the western USA.
Previous studies have suggested that bark beetles and fires can be interacting disturbances, whereby bark beetle–caused tree mortality can alter the risk and severity of subsequent wildland fires.
In areas where fire regimes and forest structure have been dramatically altered, there is increasing concern that contemporary fires have the potential to set forests on a positive feedback trajectory with successive reburns, one in which extensive stand-replacing fire could promote more stand-replacing fire.
Morel mushrooms are globally distributed, socially and economically important reproductive structures produced by fungi of the genus Morchella. Morels are highly prized edible mushrooms and significant harvests are collected throughout their range, especially in the first year after fire, when some morel species fruit prolifically.
We conducted bird surveys in 10 of the first 11 years following a mixed-severity fire in a dry, low-elevation mixed-conifer forest in western Montana, United States.