Opportunities to leverage beneficial areas of even undesirable wildfires

Description

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, government agencies are committing significant resources to fuel reduction treatments that can reduce the probability of high severity wildfire. However, even catastrophic fires with large areas of high severity can still have substantial area of lower severity fire that may be improving forest conditions locally, acting as “treatments.” Understanding how these areas of beneficial fire compare and interact with active management can help inform treatment priorities and opportunities. As a test case, we explored trends in the yellow pine and mixed conifer forests (YPMC) in the Sierra Nevada of California over a 22-year period (2001-2022).