|
|
Data accompanying the manuscript 'Patterns and drivers of early conifer regeneration following stand-replacing wildfire in Pacific Northwest (USA) temperate maritime forests' by Laughlin, Rangel-Parra, Morris, Donato, Halofsky and Harvey published in Forest Ecology and Management. Data include field measurements of post-fire seedling abundance and additional information about the forest stands where data were collected. See the main text of the manuscript for complete descriptions of how data were collected, and greater specifics on values and classifications.
Tags: Oregon,
Pacific Northwest,
USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC),
USGS:c32c2d90-316f-4086-8fa1-c1e5b226db4e,
Washington, All tags...
biota,
conifers,
ecosystem resilience,
fires,
forest,
forest ecosystems,
northwestern Cascadia,
recovery,
resilience,
western Cascades,
wildfire, Fewer tags
|
Tree regeneration is a critical mechanism of forest resilience to stand-replacing wildfire (i.e., where fire results in >90 % tree mortality), and post-fire regeneration is a concern worldwide as the climate becomes warmer. Although post-fire tree regeneration has been relatively well-studied in fire-prone forests across western North America, it is less understood in fire regimes characterized by large patches of stand-replacing fire at long intervals, such as the nominally infrequent, high-severity fire regimes of the western Cascades of Washington and northern Oregon, USA (northwestern Cascadia) where some of world’s highest-biomass forests reside. Recent wildfire activity (2015–2020) in northwestern Cascadia...
|
As wildfire activity increases and fire-size distributions potentially shift in many forested regions worldwide, anticipating the spatial patterns of burn severity expected with future fire activity is critical for ecological understanding and informing management and policy. Because spatial patterns of burn severity are influenced by a complex mixture of drivers, they remain difficult to predict for any given burned landscape. At broader extents, however, spatial scaling relationships relating high-severity patch size and shape to overall fire size, when combined with scenarios regarding regional area burned and fire-size distributions, offer a means to anticipate the spatial configuration of burn severity in future...
|
Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which...
|
|
