The purpose of this report is to provide a summary of findings and products from our FY2014 research project on fire refugia. We summarize the products and findings of our work, including: development of regional datasets; use of a climate space framework to select sample fires; development of fire refugia models across the climate space; development of fire refugia models within case study fires; and a development of a conceptual model that outlines our current endeavor to understand the formation of fire refugia under different fire environments.

We described the climate space of fire regimes in northwestern North America (Whitman and others 2015), and we are refining an approach to identify fire refugia – areas that do not burn or burn with lower severity through multiple fire events. We continue our collaboration to test the function of refugia for biodiversity conservation under current and future climate and fire scenarios. We continue to seek funding to support development of products to inform decision-making in land/easement acquisition, identification of critical areas for maintaining landscape and process connectivity/permeability, and extension of the temporal context for spatial conservation decision making. The approach is testable for transferability to other locations and ecosystems such as sagebrush-steppe, which have parallel issues.