Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe and accentuates impacts of climate change and fuel accumulation.

Fire suppression is the primary management response to wildfires in many areas globally. By removing less-extreme wildfires, this approach ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions. Here, we term this the "suppression bias" and use a simulation model to highlight how this bias fundamentally impacts wildfire activity, independent of fuel accumulation and climate change.

Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States.

Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots.

Low-density aspen seedling establishment is widespread following recent wildfires in the western United States.

Sexual regeneration is increasingly recognized as an important regeneration pathway for aspen in the western United States, a region previously thought to be too dry for seedling establishment except for during unusually wet periods. Because of this historical assumption, information on aspen seedling establishment and factors influencing its occurrence is limited and frequently anecdotal. We conducted a systematic field survey of 15 recent fire footprints that burned in 2018 in the western United States to quantify how common aspen seedling establishment is following fire and to identify factors associated with establishment.