1/n
Please see our new paper in Nature Communications!
We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥
Our key findings are as follows ...
Please see our new paper in Nature Communications!
We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥
Our key findings are as follows ...
Comments
1) Fires were, on average, much more prevalent according to the multi-century tree-ring fire-scar record compared to 1984-2022 across many forest types.
2. Recent fire years like 2020 and 2021 were not 'unprecedented' when compared to 1600-1880.
Read on, please ...
3.1) Importantly, even though contemporary fires are not unprecedented across much of our study area in terms of fire extent, contemporary wildfires are likely unprecedented in their impacts to humans and forest ecosystems.
3.2) Simply put, when compared to the 1600-1880 historical period, recent fire years are likely unprecedented in terms of highly elevated fire severity (e.g., tree mortality and soil damage), recent fire-catalyzed forest conversions, and impacts to humans and communities.
4) Without substantial investments in proactive fire management, these impacts to forests and humans are likely to intensify in future decades as fuels continue to accumulate, particularly when compounded by climate warming.
I'll end here with our conceptual model showing that a) fires were historically more prevalent yet served as a stabilizing feedback to ecosystems and humans by reducing fuel loads and risk of higher severity wildfires and b) contemporary fires are now destabilizing to forests and people.
Thanks for making this OA!
It's great the fire USED to be good.
Timber corps forced suppression, and to a degree Govt forests.
But overall, aridification of timber monoculture with the loss of old growth is what we have now. Not the same world as before, can't read too much into this paper.