Climatic Change, Wildfire, and Conservation

Abstract: Climatic variability is a dominant factor affecting large wildfires in the western United States, an observation supported by palaeoecological data on charcoal in lake sediments and reconstructions from fire‐scarred trees. Although current fire management focuses on fuel reductions to bring fuel loadings back to their historical ranges, at the regional scale extreme fire weather is still the dominant influence on area burned and fire severity. Current forecasting tools are limited to short‐term predictions of fire weather, but increased understanding of large‐scale oceanic and atmospheric patterns in the Pacific Ocean (e.g., El Niño Southern Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation) may improve our…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Agriculture
• PN
  Pacific Northwest Research Station