ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Warming enabled upslope advance in western US forest fires.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fires Beyond Fire-Prone Ecosystems: The Erosion of Beech Forest.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Comparison of Volatile Organic Compounds in Wildfire Smoke on a Dairy Farm and Nearby Cities.Atmospheric pollution research · 2026Article
- Climate-driven upward spread of forest fires in European mountain regions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Rising rates of wildfire building destruction in the conterminous United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Impact of current and warmer climate conditions on snow cover loss in burned forests.Science advances · 2025Article
- Warming accelerates global drought severity.Nature · 2025Article
- Exacerbating risk in human-ignited large fires over western United States due to lower flammability thresholds and greenhouse gas emissions.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Improved aboveground biomass estimation and regional assessment with aerial lidar in California's subalpine forests.Carbon balance and management · 2024Article
- A monthly gridded burned area database of national wildland fire data.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Social vulnerability of the people exposed to wildfires in U.S. West Coast states.Science advances · 2023Article
- Elevation-dependent intensification of fire danger in the western United States.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Delayed wildfires in 2020 promote snowpack melting in the western United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Climate change is narrowing and shifting prescribed fire windows in western United States.Communications earth & environment · 2023Article
- Forest fire threatens global carbon sinks and population centres under rising atmospheric water demand.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Increasing wildfire impacts on snowpack in the western U.S.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Wildfire plumes in the Western US are reaching greater heights and injecting more aerosols aloft as wildfire activity intensifies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States.Geophysical research letters · 2022Article
- Growing impact of wildfire on western US water supply.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Increasing large wildfires over the western United States linked to diminishing sea ice in the Arctic.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Resilience of terrestrial and aquatic fauna to historical and future wildfire regimes in western North America.Ecology and evolution · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Increases in burned area and large fire occurrence are widely documented over the western United States over the past half century. Here, we focus on the elevational distribution of forest fires in mountainous ecoregions of the western United States and show the largest increase rates in burned area above 2,500 m during 1984 to 2017. Furthermore, we show that high-elevation fires advanced upslope with a median cumulative change of 252 m (-107 to 656 m; 95% CI) in 34 y across studied ecoregions. We also document a strong interannual relationship between high-elevation fires and warm season vapor pressure deficit (VPD). The upslope advance of fires is consistent with observed warming reflected by a median upslope drift of VPD isolines of 295 m (59 to 704 m; 95% CI) during 1984 to 2017. These findings allow us to estimate that recent climate trends reduced the high-elevation flammability barrier and enabled fires in an additional 11% of western forests. Limited influences of fire management practices and longer fire-return intervals in these montane mesic systems suggest these changes are largely a byproduct of climate warming. Further weakening in the high-elevation flammability barrier with continued warming has the potential to transform montane fire regimes with numerous implications for ecosystems and watersheds.
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