Fire severity was evaluated in eight recent wildfires with standardized methods in adjacent treated and untreated stands. Sampled sites occurred in a variety of conifer forests throughout the Western United States. Treatments included reduction of surface fuels and crown fuels, both in isolation and in combination. Synthesis of our results indicates that treatment effectiveness is related to di...

In this article, I give an overview of the recent contribution of Finney et al. (1) to our understanding of how wildfires spread by providing its scientific context and also by putting forward the possible impact on the field. The rise of humanity was intimately bound to fire. Humans first observed flames when fleeing wildland fires, the natural version of the phenomenon that would then become ...

Recent, large fires in the western United States have rekindled debates about fire management and the role of natural fire regimes in the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems. This real-world experience parallels debates involving abstract models of forest fires, a central metaphor in complex systems theory. Both real and modeled fire-prone landscapes exhibit roughly power law statistics in fir...

Recent studies in theWestern United States have supported climate scenarios that predict a higher occurrence of large and severe wildfires. Knowledge of the severity is important to infer long-term biogeochemical, ecological, and societal impacts, but understanding the sensitivity of any severity mappingmethod to variations in soil type and increasing charcoal (char) cover is essential before w...

B iological invasions occur when organisms are transported and become established in a new range in which they persist, proliferate, and spread (1). The negative consequences of invasions include loss of native biological diversity and community structure (and in extreme cases, the extinction of native species) (2); modification of ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and productivity p...

Currently, US forests constitute a large carbon sink, comprising about 9 % of the global terrestrial carbon sink. Wildfire is the most significant disturbance influencing carbon dynamics in US forests. Our objective is to estimate impacts of climate change, CO2 concentration, and nitrogen deposition on the future net biome productivity (NBP) of US forests until the end of twenty-first century u...

Wildfires contribute significantly to global soot emissions, yet their aerosol formation mechanisms and resulting particle properties are poorly understood and parameterized in climate models. The conventional view holds that soot is formed via the cluster-dilute aggregation mechanism in wildfires and emitted as aggregates with fractal dimension Df ≈ 1.8 mobility diameter Dm ≤ 1 μm, and aerodyn...

Contemporary evolution of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) is best viewed in the context of the evolutionary history of the species and the dynamic ecosystems they inhabit. Speciation was complete by the late Miocene, leaving c. six million years for intraspecific diversification. Following the most recent glacial maximum, large areas became available for recolonization. Current intraspecific...