Skip to main content
Author(s):
Sean A. Parks, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Behavior
Weather
Fire Regime
Climate and Fire Regime Change
Fire Intensity / Burn Severity

NRFSN number: 22059
Record updated:

Increases in burned area across the western US since the mid‐1980’s have been widely documented and linked partially to climate factors, yet evaluations of trends in fire severity are lacking. Here, we evaluate fire severity trends and their interannual relationships to climate for western US forests from 1985‐2017. Significant increases in annual area burned at high severity (AABhs) were observed across most ecoregions, with an overall eight‐fold increase in AABhs across all western US forests. The relationships we identified between the annual fire severity metrics and climate, as well as the observed and projected trend toward warmer and drier fire seasons, suggest that climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades where fuels remain abundant. The growing prevalence of high‐severity fire in western US forests has important implications to forest ecosystems, including an increased probability of fire‐catalyzed conversions from forest to alternative vegetation types.

Citation

Parks SA and Abatzoglou JT. 2020. Warmer and drier fire seasons contribute to increases in area burned at high severity in western US forests from 1985‐2017. Geophysical Research Letter, October: 21p. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL089858

Access this Document

Treesearch

publication access with no paywall

Check to see if this document is available for free in the USDA Forest Service Treesearch collection of publications. The collection includes peer reviewed publications in scientific journals, books, conference proceedings, and reports produced by Forest Service employees, as well as science synthesis publications and other products from Forest Service Research Stations.