Assistant Professor University of Washington Seattle, Washington, United States
Wildfire activity is increasing as the climate warms, raising concerns about resilience of forest ecosystems to changing fire regimes and interactions among multiple disturbances. These concerns are particularly heightened in regions where forests are prominent ecosystems and support a large portion of ecosystem services. In this talk, I will present an overview of collaborative research in the northwest US where we are co-producing insights about forest resilience to wildfire that are both advancing ecological theory and informing on-the-ground management of forest landscapes. In several related projects, we are testing how disturbance regimes and post-disturbance trajectories are changing with warming climate. For example, through a network of field plots characterizing fire severity across gradients of forest structure and fire regimes and combining field data with satellite remote sensing, we are building a better understanding of how fires are producing severe effects in ways previously not widely documented. In other projects, we are testing how disturbances interact via mechanistic links or by producing compound cumulative effects on forested landscapes. For example, when two fires overlap spatially, they can produce cumulative spatial patterns that can homogenize components of forest landscapes, and outcomes can either promote or erode forest resilience depending on ecosystem context. Finally, across all of these projects, we are testing how management actions can foster resilience to single or multiple disturbances, through the use of several long-term experimental studies and broad spatial datasets. For example, we are testing the efficacy and longevity of silvicultural treatments in fostering forest resilience to fire, as well as interactions between fire and other disturbances such as bark beetle outbreaks. Findings highlight tradeoffs associated with a range of management goals among and within a diversity of land management perspectives. Collectively, this work highlights challenges and opportunities of understanding and managing forest resilience to fire and other disturbances as the context within which these processes are unfolding is rapidly changing.
