Citation: Coppoletta, Michelle; Merriam, Kyle E.; Collins, Brandon M. 2016. Post-fire vegetation and fuel development influences fire severity patterns in reburns. Ecological Applications 26(3):686-699.
Summary: The authors sampled field plots that reburned to examine how biophysical characteristics, topography, fire weather, time-since-fire, and initial fire severity affected subsequent reburn severity
Citation: Andrus, Robert A.; Veblen, Thomas T.; Harvey, Brian J.; Hart, Sarah J. 2016. Fire severity unaffected by spruce beetle outbreak in spruce-fir forests in southwestern Colorado. Ecological Applications 26(3):700-711.
Summary: The authors examined the effects of spruce beetle infestation on fire severity during the drought years of 2012 to 2013.
Citation: Barbero, Renaud; Abatzoglou, John T.; Larkin, Narasimhan K.; Kolden, Crystal A.; Stocks, Brian J. 2015. Climate change presents increased potential for very large fires in the contiguous United States. International Journal of Wildland Fire 24(7):892-899.
Summary: Very large fire (>5,000ha) potential was projected from 2041 – 2070 using an ensemble of 17 global climate models. The authors used known empirical relationships between climate and very large fire occurrence in order to identify future potential regional and seasonal fire distributions under future climate change.
Citation: Jolly, W. Matt; Cochrane, Mark A.; Freeborn, Patrick H.; Holden, Zachary A.; Brown, Timothy J.; Williamson, Grant J.; Bowman, David M. J. S. 2015. Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013. Nature Communications 6:7537.
Summary: The authors assessed global trends in fire weather season length.
Citation: Liu, Zhihua; Wimberly, Michael C. 2015. Climatic and landscape influences on fire regimes from 1984 to 2010 in the western United States. PLoS ONE 10(10):e0140839.
Summary: The authors examined the effect of climate, topography, vegetation, and human land use on the spatiotemporal patterns of fire occurrence, severity, and size across the western U.S. using boosted regression tree analysis.
Citation: Birch, Donovan S.; Morgan, Penelope; Kolden, Crystal A.; Abatzoglou, John T.; Dillon, Gregory K.; Hudak, Andrew T.; Smith, Alistair M. S. 2015. Vegetation, topography and daily weather influenced burn severity in central Idaho and western Montana forests. Ecosphere 6(1):art17.
Summary: The authors compared the strength or importance value of “bottom-up” controls, such as vegetation and topography to fire danger indices and daily weather variables on fire severity and daily area burned across 42 large forest fires in central Idaho and western Montana using Random Forest models.
Citation: Williams, A. Park; Seager, Richard; Macalady, Alison K.; Berkelhammer, Max; Crimmins, Michael A.; Swetnam, Thomas W.; Trugman, Anna T.; Buenning, Nikolaus; Noone, David; McDowell, Nate G.; Hryniw, Natalia; Mora, Claudia I.; Rahn, Thom. 2015. Correlations between components of the water balance and burned area reveal new insights for predicting forest fire area in the southwest United States. International Journal of Wildland Fire 24(1):14-26.
Summary: The authors correlated 15 standard climate variables and drought-related metrics, including vapor pressure deficit (VPD), to annual area burned and annual area burned at high severity using data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity dataset (1984 – 2013) in the Southwest. They used Spearman’s rank correlation and Pearson’s correlation analysis to quantify the relationships for comparison.
Citation: Tang, Ying; Zhong, Shiyuan; Luo, Lifeng; Bian, Xindi; Heilman, Warren E.; Winkler, Julie A. 2015. The potential impact of regional climate change on fire weather in the United States. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(1):1-21.
Summary: The authors assessed potential changes in fire weather conditions across the contiguous U.S. based on the Haines Index to predict how fire activity and behavior may change due to climate change.
Citation: Stoddard, Michael T.; Sánchez Meador, Andrew; Fulé, Peter Z.; Korb, Julie E. 2015. Five-year post-restoration conditions and simulated climate-change trajectories in a warm/dry mixed-conifer forest, southwestern Colorado, USA. Forest Ecology and Management 356:253-261.
Summary: The authors quantitatively compared restoration treatments: prescribed fire only, thinning followed by prescribed fire, and an untreated control, to test each treatment’s effect on forest structure and composition five years post treatment. They also projected potential forest trajectories using the Climate-Forest Vegetation Simulator under various climate scenarios.
Citation: Hood, Sharon M.; Sala, Anna; Heyerdahl, Emily K.; Boutin, Marion. 2015. Low-severity fire increases tree defense against bark beetle attacks. Ecology 96(7):1846-1855.
Summary: The authors tested the theory that frequent, low severity wildfire confers a heightened defense response to ponderosa pine against future bark beetle attack.
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