Forest Sciences Commons^™

Fire Activity And Severity In The Western Us Vary Along Proxy Gradients Representing Fuel Amount And Fuel Moisture, Sean A. Parks, Marc-Andrè Parisien, Carol Miller, Solomon Z. Dobrowski

Forest Management Faculty Publications

Numerous theoretical and empirical studies have shown that wildfire activity (e.g., area burned) at regional to global scales may be limited at the extremes of environmental gradients such as productivity or moisture. Fire activity, however, represents only one component of the fire regime, and no studies to date have characterized fire severity along such gradients. Given the importance of fire severity in dictating ecological response to fire, this is a considerable knowledge gap. For the western US, we quantify relationships between climate and the fire regime by empirically describing both fire activity and severity along two climatic water balance gradients, …