Wildfire directly changes the physical properties of Earth’s critical zone, which leads to catastrophic changes in ecological and hydrological processes (Shakesby & Doerr, 2006). Uncontrolled wildfire in forested headwater catchments often increases the risk to downstream communities and ecosystems from increased frequency and magnitude of runoff, erosion, landslides, and debris flows. Post-fire changes to soil properties also limit the total soil moisture storage and plant available water in recovering systems due to a combination of organic matter loss and direct changes to soil bulk properties, posing risk to long-term forest regrowth and landscape stability. To mitigate these risks we need improved understanding of the key mechanisms that control fire effects on soils and more capable predictions of post-fire ecohydrological responses across a broad range of ecoregions. With the expected increases in wildfire burned area and burn severity in the western U.S., land managers will require effective science-based decision support tools, based on robustly-tested theories, to efficiently direct mitigation efforts in highly sensitive landscapes. Currently, many models exist to assist managers in targeted post-fire treatment and prefire planning for erosion and flood risk. There are a growing number of groups, including some Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams in the U.S., and similar groups internationally, relying on physically-based models; e.g., the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model is a commonly used example of such tools. Newer spatial interfaces for WEPP or other such models have proved valuable for rapid assessment, but the extensive and spatially-variable soil hydraulic parameterizations needed to make this type of model most effective have so far not moved past a static set of generalized soil parameters that, critically, also do not yet systematically account for fire alterations, e.g., by predicting likely post-fire changes and variations in soil hydraulic properties. While the general effects of wildfire on soils are well known, we lack a suite of robust functions to quantitatively transform the typical model inputs from general (pre-fire) soil survey data (e.g., SSURGO) to the likely post-fire altered-states needed for site-specific post-fire ecohydrological and geomorphological assessments. Without such ability to update soil hydraulic properties to account for burn effects, the potential value of such spatially-distributed risk and impact models to aid post-fire risk management and recovery planning remains substantially hampered. This study expands our knowledge of how key soil hydraulic properties are affected by differing degrees of wildfire burn severity across the temperate rainforest regions of the western Cascade Mountains of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, as well as, in contrast, dry forest of the eastern Cascades foothills bordering on the northern Basin and Range in south-central Oregon. This study particularly attended to sampling across several distinct soil groups of differing soil textural properties, and to collecting many different types of measures of soil physical and hydraulic properties both in-field and lab-base. These efforts were aimed to help clarify the various contributions of forest ecosystem type, soil-series and texture, choice of measurement variable, and choice of measurement method on the degrees to which various soil hydraulic properties were changed by wildfire, toward being able to more systematically assess and predict how soil hydraulic properties’ input parameter values in research and management models ought to numerically change upon fire-impact to more capably simulate post-fire soil physics and landscape hazards.