Effectiveness of forest density reduction treatments for increasing drought resistance of ponderosa pine growth.

As the climate changes, it is increasingly important to understand how forests will respond to drought and how forest management can influence those outcomes. In many forests that have become unnaturally dense, "restoration treatments," which decrease stand density using fire and/or mechanical thinning, are generally associated with reduced mortality during drought. However, the effects of such treatments on tree growth during drought are less clear.

High-severity wildfire leads to multi-decadal impacts on soil biogeochemistry in mixed-conifer forests.

During the past century, systematic wildfire suppression has decreased fire frequency and increased fire severity in the western United States of America. While this has resulted in large ecological changes aboveground such as altered tree species composition and increased forest density, little is known about the long-term, belowground implications of altered, ecologically novel, fire regimes, especially on soil biological processes. To better understand the long-term implications of ecologically novel, high-severity fire, we used a 44-yr high-severity fire chronosequence in the Sierra Nevada where forests were historically adapted to frequent, low-severity fire, but were fire suppressed for at least 70 yr.