Fire
Fire
Fire historically has played a critical role in shaping and maintaining ecosystems, and its management is of critical importance to society. The Climate R&D Program conducts research nationally to document the history, causes, and impacts of wildfire over decades to millennia. This research is supporting development of sustainable fire management strategies by managers and policy makers.
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Holocene and Modern Drivers of Wetland Change
On a global scale, wetland systems have been affected by climate extremes, changing sea level, and population growth, reducing their capacity to moderate storm surge, filter contaminants, store carbon, and provide habitats for fish and wildlife. This research takes a long-term perspective on the resilience of wetlands to a range of climatic and human-induced changes and provides critical data to...
Did we start the fire? Climate, Fire and Humans
The past decade encompasses some of the most extensive fire activity in recorded history. An area the size of Vermont (~24,000 km2) burned in a single Siberian fire in the summer of 2019 (Kehrwald et al., 2020 and references therein) while Australia, Indonesia and the Amazon have all experienced their most intense fires in recorded history (van Wees et al, 2021 and references therein). As more...
Response of plant, microbial, and soil functions to drought and fire in California
California is experiencing changes in precipitation and wildfire regimes. Longer, hotter fire seasons along with extremes in precipitation are expected to continue. Not only do these disturbances affect the productivity and resilience of ecosystems, they also directly impact human health and wellbeing. Soils hold an immense amount of our terrestrial carbon pool, and the microorganisms and minerals...
Arctic Biogeochemical Response to Permafrost Thaw (ABRUPT)
Warming and thawing of permafrost soils in the Arctic is expected to become widespread over the coming decades. Permafrost thaw changes ecosystem structure and function, affects resource availability for wildlife and society, and decreases ground stability which affects human infrastructure. Since permafrost soils contain about half of the global soil carbon (C) pool, the magnitude of C losses...
Understanding long-term drivers of vegetation change and stability in the Southern Rocky Mountains with paleoecological data and ecological models
Drought and fire are powerful disturbance agents that can trigger rapid and lasting changes in the forests of western North America. Over the last decade, increases in fire size and severity coincided with warming, drought, and earlier snowmelt, factors that projected climatic changes are likely to exacerbate. However, recent observations are brief relative to the lifespans of trees and include...
Past Perspectives of Water in the West
In the intermountain west, seasonal precipitation extremes, combined with population growth, are creating new challenges for the management of water resources, ecosystems, and geologic hazards. This research contributes a comprehensive long-term context for a deeper understanding of past hydrologic variability, including the magnitude and frequency of drought and flood extremes and ecosystem...
Drivers and Impacts of North Pacific Climate Variability
Climate model forecasts indicate an increase in extreme hydrologic events, including floods and droughts, for California and the western U.S. in the future. To better understand what the consequences of this future change in climate may be, USGS scientists are studying the frequency, magnitude, and impacts of past hydroclimate variability and extremes in the region. This project produces well...
Effects of disturbance and drought on the forests and hydrology of the Southern Rocky Mountains
Climate-related forest disturbances, particularly drought-induced tree mortality and large, high-severity fires from increasingly warm and dry conditions, are altering forest ecosystems and the ecosystem services society depends on (e.g., water supplies). Our research combines long-term place-based ecological data, diverse methods (e.g., paleo, remote-sensing), and networking approaches to...
Forest health and drought response
Forests provide society with economically important and often irreplaceable goods and services, such as wood products, carbon sequestration, clean water, biodiversity, and recreational opportunities. Yet hotter droughts (droughts in which unusually high temperatures exacerbate the effects of low precipitation) are projected to increase in frequency and intensity in coming decades, potentially...
Connections between Forested and Urban Landscapes and Implications for Water Supply
Interactions between forested and urban landscapes can lead to reciprocal effects that have substantial impacts on water supply and ecology. Air pollution from urban and forested landscapes can be deposited on adjacent forests, while forest disturbance, such as wildfires and floods, can remobilize those contaminants. Additionally, pollutants from legacy land use (e.g., mining) can also be...
Holocene Hydroclimate of Western North America
The objectives of this project are to reconstruct detailed histories of Holocene hydroclimate and corresponding environmental change from geological archives such as lake sediment, peat, and wood to more fully understand past, ongoing, and future change and its impacts.
Terrestrial Records of Holocene Climate Change: Fire, climate and humans
Large wildfires have raged across the western Americas in the past decade including the Las Conchas, New Mexico fire that burned 44,000 acres in a single day in 2011 (Orem and Pelletier, 2015, Geomorphology 232: 224-238, and references therein), the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta fire that required evacuating an entire city, and the 2015 Alaskan fire season that burned more than 5 million acres...