Wildfires are common across the Pacific Northwest, however climate change is projected to cause increases in wildfire activity and severity. Wildfires create a heterogeneous pattern across the landscape from severely burned areas to unburned patches. Unburned areas that are associated with critical habitat where biota can persist (e.g., old growth forest) and/or can recolonize neighboring burned areas are defined as fire refugia. They provide shelter for a range of fauna post-fire and can reduce detrimental impacts on hydrology and erosion. Therefore, management actions focused on maintaining or promoting these ecologically important areas on the landscape will be critical in the future, particularly under rapid climate change.

This report details the finding of a Joint Fire Science Program project funded in 2016 entitled: “Identifying and Protecting Wildfire Refugia in a Warmer, Drier Pacific Northwest” funded under L16AC00202. Here we report on creating an unburned area data set for the Inland Northwest from 1984 –2014 and subsequent analyses using this dataset. Some of our key findings for thisJFSP project include: Unburned area occurrence is consistent or stabilized to-date, with no evidence of increasing or decreasing trends under current climate conditions Unburned areas are utilized by sage grouse and help maintain viable populations when these fire refugia are present Persistent unburned islands are ecologically important areas and are related to specific topography and fuel type characteristics Persistent unburned area attributes differ between forests and rangelands.

From our participatory GIS survey and workshops,we conclude that managers are increasingly interested in managing for fire refugia but that a single one-size-fits-all approach is not feasible for multiple species over large management areas.We also conclude that natural resource managers should place fire refugia in a landscape context to improve monitoring across regional scales.