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Dryad

Leveraging wildfire to augment forest management and amplify forest resilience

Shive, Kristen1; Knight, Clarke2; Wilson, Kristen L.3; Steel, Zachary L.4; Stanley, Charlotte K.3

Published May 22, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m7d

Data files

Abstract

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity, but the probability of high severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies have committed significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, wildfires also have the potential to act as “treatments” in areas that burn at lower severity, but even catastrophic fires with large areas of high severity can still have substantial area of lower severity fire that may be improving forest conditions. We quantified active management and wildfire severity across yellow pine and mixed conifer forests (YPMC) in the Sierra Nevada of California over a 22-year period (2001-2022). We did not detect clear increases in the area treated through time but the area of beneficial wildfire (low to moderate severity) increased substantially, exceeding active treatment area in 9 of 22 years. Overall, beneficial wildfire treated ~20% more area than all treatments combined, and nearly seven times more area than fire-related treatments alone. We then used disturbance history to evaluate resistance to high severity wildfire and forest loss across the YPMC range. Of the 2.3 million ha that were YPMC forests in 2001, 19% lost mature forests due to high severity fire by 2022, nearly half of all YPMC area burned. Most of the landscape (47%) remains at risk of high severity fire because it had no restorative disturbances, but 33% of the study area has some level of resistance to high severity wildfire. In these areas, resistance will need to be enhanced and maintained over time via active management or managed wildfire. These treatment needs will likely outpace capacity even under optimistic implementation scenarios. Given limited resources for implementing active management and the likelihood of a more fiery future, incorporating beneficial wildfire into landscape-level treatment planning has the potential to amplify active management treatments, expanding the forest area that is resistant to high severity wildfire.