Fire regimes of red fir communities

Photo Credit

Photo by Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences. Used with permission.

A red fir community at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park.

A complete Fire Regime Synthesis for red fir communities has not yet been published in the Fire Effects Information System. However, The Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides a review and synthesis of the historical range of variability in red fir communities (Meyer 2016 [1]). It includes information on:

• Physical setting and geographic distribution
• Ecological setting
• Holocene history
• Cultural-socioeconomic setting
• Reference conditions
• Descriptions of natural range of variation including:
  • plant community composition (geographic distribution of major hardwood species, successional changes, diversity)
  • stand structure (age class; cover, density, and basal area; patch sizes; distribution of fuel loads)
  • function (climate; disturbances including fire, grazing, insects and disease; wind and volcanism; climatic water deficit)
• Deviations from natural variation and future trends

The literature review of fire regimes occurs in the in the "NRV descriptions and comparisons to current conditions" section of this publication.

LANDFIRE succession modeling of red fir Biophysical Settings (BpS) also provides estimates of fire regime characteristics (see the LANDFIRE Biophysical Settings section). The map in figure 1 shows where these BpSs occur, and was updated in 2026 to show the most recent (2020) LANDFIRE BpS data layer.