Scientists at the USGS Fort Collins Science Center, including Dr. Ellis Margolis and former USGS researcher Dr. Andreas Wion, worked with collaborators

 from universities, federal agencies, and international partners to reconstruct a 500-year history of fire in the dry-conifer forests of northern New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains. Researchers used the largest tree-ring fire-scar network in North America to show that, before 1900, these forests burned frequently but at a low severity, creating a stable ecosystem.  

Over the past 30 years, however, fires in the same forests have been burning with high severity, due to increased fuels from fire exclusion combined with warmer drought. For example, recent fires, including the 2011 Las Conchas megafire, burned so intensely that they erased centuries of ecological and cultural history preserved in the old-growth trees. This new study shows that the large size of today’s repeated high-severity fires and minimal postfire regeneration are unprecedented in at least the last five centuries. Simulations suggest that if current trends continue, up to half of existing dry-conifer forests could disappear by 2055, and only a quarter may remain by 2115.  

This long-term perspective highlights the importance of restoring frequent, low-severity fire, a natural process these landscapes have adapted to, for increasing the resilience of dry-conifer forest landscapes. 

Read the paper: A.P. Wion, J.T. Stevens, J.D. Coop, C.A. Farris, S.A. Parks, C.D. Allen, & E.Q. Margolis, Recent high-severity wildfires in a dry-conifer landscape are unprecedented over five centuries and foretell future forest loss, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (36) e2513731123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2513731123 (2026). 

This research was funded in part by the USGS Ecosystems' Land Change Science Program.