ponderosa pine

Context Lack of quantitative observations of extent, frequency, and severity of large historical fires constrains awareness of departure of contemporary conditions from those that demonstrated resistance and resilience to frequent fire and recurring drought. Objectives Compare historical and contemporary fire and forest conditions for a dry forest landscape with few barriers to fire spread.

Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century.

A major goal of managers in fire-prone forests is restoring historical structure and composition to promote resilience to future drought and disturbance. To accomplish this goal, managers require information about reference conditions in different forest types, as well as tools to determine which individual trees to retain or remove to approximate those reference conditions.

Managers use restorative fire and thinning for ecological benefits and to convert fuel-heavy forests to fuel-lean landscapes that lessen the threat of stand-replacing wildfire. In this study, we evaluated the long-term impact of thinning and prescribed fire on soil biochemistry and the mycorrhizal fungi associated with ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa).

Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century.

Wildfires pose a unique challenge to conservation in fire‐prone regions, yet few studies quantify the cumulative effects of wildfires on forest dynamics (i.e., changes in structural conditions) across landscape and regional scales.

An understanding of how historical fire and structure in dry forests (ponderosa pine, dry mixed conifer) varied across the western United States remains incomplete. Yet, fire strongly affects ecosystem services, and forest restoration programs are underway.

Current conditions in dry forests of the western United State have given rise to policy mandates for accelerated ecological restoration on U.S. National Forest System and other public lands. In southwestern ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Laws.) forests, mechanized tree thinning and prescribed fire are common restoration treatments but are not acceptable for all sites.

Prescribed fire is widely applied in western US forests to limit future fire severity by reducing tree density, fuels, and excessive seedlings. Repeated prescribed burning attempts to simulate historical fire regimes in frequent-fire forests, yet there is limited long-term information regarding optimal burn season and frequency.

Describing the climate influences on historical wildland fire will aid managers in planning for future change.