A century or more of fire suppression has altered forest structure and pattern in the American West and in many places around the world. These changes in the return interval, extent, and intensity of fire have resulted in increases in forest density, fuel loads, and fire risk. These latter changes have effects on wildlife habitat and understory biodiversity; forest structure, composition, and regeneration; ecosystem functioning; fire behavior, including susceptibility to catastrophic fire; and risk of epidemic loss to insects and disease due to a more homogeneous forest structure. To restore pre-settlement forest structure and pattern and reduce fire risk a number of scientists recommend restoration of the forests.Analysts advocating restoration of forests to recover to historic conditions while minimizing risks have advocated two general approaches. Structural restorationists would alter forest structure to historic conditions by silvicultural (mechanical) treatment such as thinning followed by the reintroduction of fire. They argue first, that prescribed fire in unthinned stands could result in stand-replacing fires and second, that historic forest conditions could not be achieved since forests become more homogeneous during the period of suppression. Process restorationists would restore native processes -- fire -- directly, without first modifying fuel loads, with the goal of recreating historic forest structures. Process restorationists maintain that one or two sequential prescribed fires, carefully planned and managed, would begin to re-establish forest condition with little risk of catastrophic loss to fire. They argue that reintroducing fire directly is more cost effective and avoids undesirable ecological side effects introduced by structural restoration. The implications of this debate have profound significance to managers wishing to restore forest conditions and ecologists wishing to understand fire ecology, disturbance regimes, and multiple pathways of succession.Little information exists to address this debate, however, particularly from the process-restoration point of view. In order to support restoration and fire implementation decisions we need to have better information on both the current and post-fire conditions of forests. The research described in this prospectus involves collecting data on landscape forest structure and pattern in the Mineral King watershed of Sequoia National Park California. A team of managers and scientists from the National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and National Interagency Fire Center have chosen this watershed to test the practicality of reintroducing prescribed fire at a large scale. High resolution, multispectral remote imagery is available for the entire watershed from prior to the onset of pescribed burning and similar data will be collected after the burns occur. Additionally, data are collected in the field to ground-truth the remote imagery and provide ecological information on in-stand forest conditions not available from above.This research is divided into several questions. First, what is the range of historic structure and pattern of the mixed conifer forest in this area? Second, how does prescribed fire alter structural, compositional, and spatial diversity and complexity in the forest? Third, using the answer to question two, can prescribed fire be used to restore forest condition to the state or range of variability described in the answer to the first question, i.e., 'does process restoration work?'In order to address these questions we are collecting data from three time periods -- historic, current, and post-fire -- and at two spatial scales -- in-stand and between-stand. By examining the condition of the forest in each of these six time-space categories and measuring the change between them we should have a better sense of how the absence of prescribed fire and its reintroduction affect this important forest type in the Sierra Nevada and what the implications may be for restoration efforts. In a decision support capacity, this ecological information will feed back into planning to achieve ecological goals and, indirectly, into event management of individual fires for safety, fuels management, and strategy.