SCIENCE@home

Spatiotemporal patterns of unburned areas within fire perimeters in the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014

A. Meddens,C. Kolden,J. Lutz,J. Abatzoglou,A. Hudak

Published 2016 in Ecosphere

ABSTRACT

. A warming climate, fi re exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that pro-duced historical fi re regimes and facilitating increased recent wild fi re activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fi re regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fi re regimes is the unburned area within fi re perimeters; these areas can function as fi re refugia across the landscape during and after wild fi re by providing habitat and seed sources. With increasing fi re activity, there is speculation that fi re intensity and combustion completeness are also increasing, which we hypothesized would yield smaller unburned proportions and changes in fi re refugia patterns. We sought to determine (1) whether the unburned proportion of wild fi res decreased across the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014 and (2) whether patterns of unburned patches were signi fi cantly different across ecoregions, land cover type, and land ownership. We utilized a Landsat-derived geospatial database of unburned islands within 2298 fi res across the inland northwestern USA (including eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and Idaho) from 1984 to 2014. We evaluated patterns of the total unburned proportion and spatial patterns of unburned patches of the fi res across different ecoregions, land cover types, and land ownership. We found that unburned area proportion exhibited no change over the three decades, suggesting that recent trends in area burned and overall severity have not affected fi re refugia, important to post- fi re ecosystem recovery. There were ecoregional differences in mean unburned proportion, patch area, and patch density, suggesting in fl uences of vegetation and topography on the formation of unburned area. These foundation fi ndings suggest that complex drivers control unburned island formation, and yield insights to locate potential important fi re refugia across the inland northwest.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-63 of 63 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-49 of 49 citing papers · Page 1 of 1