Climate change is altering the patterns and characteristics of fire across natural systems in the United States. Resource managers in the Northwest are faced with making natural resource and fire management decisions now, despite a lack of accessible information about how those decisions will play out as fire regimes, and ecosystem responses, will change across the landscape. Decision makers in natural-resource management increasingly require information about projected future changes in fire regimes to effectively prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts. An accessible and forward-looking summary of what we know about the “future of fire” is urgently required in the Northwest and across the country to support resource management decision-making.
To meet this need, the project team will conduct a synthesis of changing fire dynamics in the Northwest, and will relate these changes to natural resource management options and opportunities. A post-doctoral fellow will lead work to build on knowledge of fire-driven vegetation transformations in the Northwest and address the actionable science agenda co-produced during the NW-CASC’s 2020 Deep Dive, and will continue to engage with stakeholders, practitioners, and researchers around ecosystem vulnerability to a changing climate and more fire. This effort is focused on mapping the vulnerability of Northwest forests to fire-driven transformations and co-producing new knowledge about how management activities can be used to resist, accept, or direct likely ecosystem trajectories. With the USGS Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Fellows cohort, knowledge about the state of the science on fire in the Northwest will be integrated into a national-scope synthesis of strategies to adapt people and ecosystems to the future of fire.