- Wildfires -- Cascade Range,
- Wildfires -- Pacific Northwest,
- Wildfires -- Environmental aspects,
- Forest fires -- Environmental aspects,
- Forest restoration
Increasing forest fuel aridity with climate change may be expanding mid-to-high-elevation forests’ vulnerability to large, severe, and frequent wildfire. Long-lasting changes in forests’ structure and composition may occur if dominant tree species are poorly adapted to shifting wildfire patterns. We hypothesized that altered fire activity may lower existing forest resilience and disrupt the recovery of upper-montane and subalpine conifer forest types. We empirically tested this hypothesis by quantifying post-fire forest structure and conifer tree regeneration after spatially large, severe, and rapidly repeated wildfires (
© 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Originally appeared in Ecosphere, vol. 11, issue 9, 2020. Published by the Ecological Society of America. May be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3247.