Impacts of burn severity on short-term postfire vegetation recovery, surface albedo, and land surface temperature in California ecoregions.

Wildfire burn severity has important implications for postfire vegetation recovery and boundary-layer climate. We used a collection of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) datasets to investigate the impact of burn severity (relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio, RdNBR) on vegetation recovery (Enhanced Vegetation Index, EVI), albedo change, and land surface temperature in seven California ecoregions, including: Southern California Mountains (SCM), Southern California Coast (SCC), Central California Foothills (CCF), Klamath (K), Cascades (C), Eastern Cascades (EC), and Sierra Nevada (SN). A statewide MODIS-derived RdNBR dataset was used to analyze the impact of burn severity on the five-year postfire early-summer averages of each biophysical variable between the years 2003-2020.

A landscape-scale framework to identify refugia from multiple stressors.

From a conservation perspective, quantifying potential refugial capacity has been predominantly focused on climate refugia, which is critical for maintaining the persistence of species and ecosystems. However, protection from other stressors, such as human-induced changes in fire and hydrology, that cause habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation is also necessary to ensure that conservation efforts focused on climate are not undermined by other threats. Thus, conceptual and methodological advances for quantifying potential refugia from multiple anthropogenic stressors are important to support conservation efforts.