Background: Historically, reburn dynamics from cultural and lightning ignitions were central to the historical ecology of fire in the western United States (wUS), whereby past fire effects limited future fire growth and severity. Over millennia, reburns created heterogenous patchworks of vegetation and fuels that provided avenues and impediments to the flow of future fires, and feedbacks to future fire event sizes and their severity patterns. These dynamics have been significantly altered after more than a century of settler colonization, fire exclusion, and past forest management, now compounded by rapid climatic warming. Under climate change, the area impacted by large and severe wildfires will likely increase – with further implications for self-regulating properties of affected systems. An in-depth understanding of the ecology of reburns and their influence on system-level dynamics provides a baseline for understanding current and future landscape fire-vegetation interactions.
Results: Here, we present a detailed characterization of REBURN – a geospatial modeling framework designed to simulate reburn dynamics over large areas and long time frames. We interpret fire-vegetation dynamics for a large testbed landscape in eastern Washington State, USA. The landscape is comprised of common temperate forest and nonforest vegetation types distributed along broad topo-edaphic gradients. Each pixel in a vegetation type is represented by a pathway group (PWG), which assigns a specific state-transition model (STM) based on that pixel’s biophysical setting. STMs represent annualized vegetation and fuel succession, and wildfire effects on succession. Wildfire dynamics are driven by annual ignitions, fire weather and topographic conditions, and annual vegetation and fuel successional states of burned and unburned pixels.
Conclusions: Our 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 framework will be used in future studies to evaluate future climate change scenarios and compare the efficacy of fire management strategies that either enable the return of active fire regimes or depend on fire suppression and their effects on forest burning.