Post-fire tree mortality

Abstract

By killing trees, wildland fires influence ecosystems in many ways, including limiting ecosystem productivity, altering resource availability, and changing the structure and composition of vegetation (Bond and Keeley 2005). These changes can have both positive and negative impacts on carbon storage, biodiversity conservation, hydrologic processes, and economic and social services (Bowman et al. 2009). In fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems, fire controls tree density and species dominance, creating habitat that supports diverse plant and animal species that cannot persist in the absence of fire. However, fire-adapted ecosystems may be vulnerable to climate-driven alterations to fire regimes that are an emerging threat in recent decades, with observations of increasing fire size, frequency, and severity (Flannigan et al. 2009; Pechony and Shindell 2010; Seidl et al. 2016). Climate-mediated increases in fire severity and frequency are projected to cause large decreases in carbon stocks through loss in forested area (Liang et al. 2017), and increased fire frequency is killing trees before maturity (Bowman et al. 2014). Such changes in fire regimes can shift forests to nonforested states (Fairman et al. 2016; Walker et al. 2018). These impacts make understanding firecaused tree mortality essential to predicting fire effects from local to global scales.

Citation

Hood, Sharon M.; Varner, J. Morgan. 2019. Post-fire tree mortality. In: Manzello, Samuel L., ed. Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 10 p.