Climate exceeded human management as the dominant control of fire at the regional scale in California’s Sierra Nevada

Vachula, Richard S.; Russell, James M.; Huang, Yongsong

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab4669

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In contrast, by assessing the ecophysiological attributes of plant taxa in Eastern USA pollen records, Nowacki and Abrams (2015) illustrated how altered disturbance regimes, particularly land-use change followed by fire suppression, probably played a stronger role than climate in modifying vegetation structure over the past c. 500 years. Ensuing debate regarding the relative roles of past climate, fire and human land use in this region (Abrams & Nowacki, 2020;Armstrong et al, 2020;Oswald et al, 2020b;Roos, 2020) has highlighted the complexity of examining human versus natural disturbances on vegetation, given issues related to historical documentation of Indigenous land use, spatial heterogeneity of past land management practices and the scale dependence of identifying drivers of change (see also Bishop et al, 2015;Dietze et al, 2018;Vachula et al, 2019).…”

Section: Is Entang Ling Climate and Anthrop Og Enic Dis Turban Ce Reg Ime Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Emerging palaeoecological frameworks for elucidating plant dynamics in response to fire and other disturbance

Napier

Chipman

2021

Global Ecol. Biogeogr.

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Motivation: Rapid climate change is altering plant communities around the globe fundamentally. Despite progress in understanding how plants respond to these climate shifts, accumulating evidence suggests that disturbance could not only modify expected plant responses but, in some cases, have larger impacts on compositional shifts than climate change. Climate-driven disturbances are becoming increasingly common in many biomes and are key drivers of vegetation dynamics at both species and community levels. Palaeoecological records provide valuable observational windows for elucidating the long-term impacts of these disturbances on plant dynamics; however, sparse resolution and difficulty in disentangling drivers of change limit our ability to understand the impact of disturbance on plant communities. In this targeted review, we highlight emerging opportunities in palaeoecology to advance our understanding about how disturbance, especially fire, impacts the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of terrestrial plant communities. Location:Global examples, with many from North America. Conclusions:We propose a set of palaeoecological and integrative approaches that could greatly enhance our understanding of how disturbance regimes influence global plant dynamics. Specifically, we identify four future study areas: (1) focus on palaeoecological disturbance proxies beyond fire and leverage multi proxy research to examine the influence of interacting disturbances on plant community dynamics;(2) use advances in disturbance and vegetation reconstructions, including ancient sedimentary DNA, to provide the spatial, temporal and taxonomic resolution needed to resolve the relationship between changing disturbance regimes and corresponding shifts in plant community composition; (3) integrate palaeoecological, archaeological and Indigenous knowledge to disentangle the complex interplay between climate, human land use, fire and vegetation structure; and (4) apply "functional palaeoecology" and the synergy between palaeoecology and genetics to understand how fire disturbance has served as a long-standing selective agent on plants. These frameworks could increase the resolution of disturbance-driven plant dynamics, potentially providing valuable information for future management.

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Section: Is Entang Ling Climate and Anthrop Og Enic Dis Turban Ce Reg Ime Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Emerging palaeoecological frameworks for elucidating plant dynamics in response to fire and other disturbance

Napier

Chipman

2021

Global Ecol. Biogeogr.

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“…Charcoal data from Lauvdalsvatnet complement our PAH records and allow direct comparison to previously published paleofire records from Fennoscandia. We analyzed different charcoal size fractions, which can be used to distinguish local from more regional fire activity (Gardner and Whitlock, 2001; Vachula et al, 2019). Charcoal particles >125 μm better represent local fire activity, whereas smaller particles (63–125 μm), which can be transported farther from the source, can better record regional fire activity (Gardner and Whitlock, 2001; Higuera et al, 2011; Vachula et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Northern Norway paleofire records reveal two distinct phases of early human impacts on fire activity

et al. 2023

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Paleofire records document fire’s response to climate, ecosystem changes, and human-activity, offering insights into climate-fire-human relationships and the potential response of fire to anthropogenic climate change. We present three new lake sediment PAH records and a charcoal record from the Lofoten Islands, Norway to evaluate the Holocene fire history of northern Norway and examine human impacts on fire in this region. All three datasets show an increase in PAH accumulation rate over the past c. 7500 cal years BP, with an increase c. 5000 cal years BP that signals initial human impacts on fire activity. More significant increases c. 3500 cal years BP reach a maximum c. 2000 cal years BP that correlates with the establishment and expansion of agricultural settlements in Lofoten during the Late Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age. Decreased PAH accumulation rates c. 1500–900 cal years BP reflect less burning during the Late Iron Age and early medieval period. A shift toward higher molecular weight PAHs and increasing PAHs overall from c. 1000 cal years BP to present, reflects intensified human activity. Sedimentary charcoal (>125 and 63–125 µm) in the Lauvdalsvatnet record does not vary until an increase in the last 900 years, showing a proxy insensitivity to human-caused fire. The Late-Holocene increase in fire activity in Lofoten follows trends in regional charcoal records, but exhibits two distinct phases of increased fire that reflect the intensity of burning due to human landscape changes that overwhelm the signal of natural variations in regional fire activity.

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“…At fine spatial scales, several models have been developed to represent both wildfire and vegetation demographic processes, but all are too computationally intensive to be used to study vegetation‐wildfire dynamics, and anthropogenic modification of vegetation fuels, at broad spatial domains (Albrich et al., 2020; Hansen et al., 2022; Hurteau et al., 2019; Seidl et al., 2014; Serra‐Diaz et al., 2018). One such domain is the ∼77,000‐km 2 Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, a region of major concern for wildfire risk under changing climatic conditions (Kennedy et al., 2021; Vachula et al., 2019). DYNAFFOREST's parsimonious representation of vegetation processes allows for sufficient computational efficiency to both simulate broad spatial domains of forested area in the western US and provide a nuanced map of evolving forest structure and fuels.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Vegetation Fuel Reduction Treatments Alter Forest Fire Severity and Carbon Stability in California Forests?

Daum,

Hansen,

Gellman

et al. 2024

Earth's Future

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Forest fire frequency, extent, and severity have rapidly increased in recent decades across the western United States (US) due to climate change and suppression‐oriented wildfire management. Fuels reduction treatments are an increasingly popular management tool, as evidenced by California's plan to treat 1 million acres annually by 2050. However, the aggregate efficacy of fuels treatments in dry forests at regional and multi‐decadal scales is unknown. We develop a novel fuels treatment module within a coupled dynamic vegetation and fire model to study the effects of dead biomass removal from forests in the Sierra Nevada region of California. We ask how annual treatment extent, stand‐level treatment intensiveness, and spatial treatment placement alter fire severity and live carbon loss. We find that a ∼30% reduction in stand‐replacing fire was achieved under our baseline treatment scenario of 1,000 km2 year−1 after a 100‐year treatment period. Prioritizing the most fuel‐heavy stands based on precise fuel distributions yielded cumulative reductions in pyrogenic stand‐replacement of up to 50%. Both removing constraints on treatment location due to remoteness, topography, and management jurisdiction and prioritizing the most fuel‐heavy stands yielded the highest stand‐replacement rate reduction of ∼90%. Even treatments that succeeded in lowering aggregate fire severity often took multiple decades to yield measurable effects, and avoided live carbon loss remained negligible across scenarios. Our results suggest that strategically placed fuels treatments are a promising tool for controlling forest fire severity at regional, multi‐decadal scales, but may be less effective for mitigating live carbon losses.

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Climate exceeded human management as the dominant control of fire at the regional scale in California’s Sierra Nevada

Abstract: The societal impacts of recent, severe fires in California highlight the need to understand the longterm effectiveness of human fire management. The relative influences of local management and climate at centennial timescales are controversial and poorly understood.

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Emerging palaeoecological frameworks for elucidating plant dynamics in response to fire and other disturbance

Emerging palaeoecological frameworks for elucidating plant dynamics in response to fire and other disturbance

Northern Norway paleofire records reveal two distinct phases of early human impacts on fire activity

Do Vegetation Fuel Reduction Treatments Alter Forest Fire Severity and Carbon Stability in California Forests?

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