The landscape of eastern Washington, USA is comprised of common temperate forest and nonforest vegetation types distributed along broad topo-edaphic gradients. This landscape acts as the large testbed for presenters Susan Prichard and Paul Hessburg to interpret fire-vegetation dynamics over multiple fires. By assigning individual pixels to unique vegetation types, their research simulates daily and annually summarized vegetation and fuel succession and wildfire effects on forest and nonforest succession. The presenters will discuss how wildfire dynamics are driven by annual ignitions, fire weather and topographic conditions, and annual vegetation and fuel successional states of burned and unburned pixels. This simulation study is the first to evaluate how fire exclusion and forest management altered the active fire regime of this landscape, its surface and canopy fuel patterns, forest and nonforest structural conditions, and the dynamics of forest reburning.

The REBURN model is now being used in related studies in Canada and northern CA to evaluate future climate change scenarios and compare the efficacy of fire and fuel management strategies that either enable the return of active fire regimes or depend on fire suppression and continued wildfire effects on forest burning.