ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 150 citations in OpenAlex.
- Recent high-severity wildfires in a dry-conifer landscape are unprecedented over five centuries and foretell future forest loss.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Faster, bigger, more severe: Extreme wildfire spread sets the stage for forest ecosystem change in western and boreal North America.Science advances · 2026Article
- Prescribed fire is unlikely to reduce net PMProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- European beech reproduction is not reduced by drought, including the 2003, 2018, and 2022 extremes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Socio-ecological impacts of the 2025 Los Angeles urban fires on communities, neighborhoods, and homes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Climate-driven upward spread of forest fires in European mountain regions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Alternative Future Vegetation Pathways Reveal Potential Transformations of Western US Ecosystems.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Interactive Effects of Root-Promoting Treatments and Media on Clonal Propagation of Two Western Pine Species.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Post-fire structural forest recovery associated with climate extremes in dry sub-boreal forests.Landscape ecology · 2026Article
- Synthesizing Spectral and Field Observations of Post-fire Conifer Recovery in Dry Conifer Forests.Ecosystems (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Canopy seed survival through extreme fire in non-serotinous conifers: An unexpected source of forest resilience.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US Forests.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Aspen impedes wildfire spread in southwestern United States landscapes.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Radiative impact of record-breaking wildfires from integrated ground-based data.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Extreme Fire Spread Events Burn More Severely and Homogenize Postfire Landscapes in the Southwestern United States.Global change biology · 2025Article
- A post-fire reforestation assessment and prioritization tool for the Western United States.Fire ecology · 2025Article
- Carbon, climate, and natural disturbance: a review of mechanisms, challenges, and tools for understanding forest carbon stability in an uncertain future.Carbon balance and management · 2024Review
- Climate change and California's terrestrial biodiversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Sapling recruitment as an indicator of carbon resiliency in forests of the northern USA.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The importance of regeneration processes on forest biodiversity in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
63 authors at 20 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
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. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and postfire climate, which influences seedling establishment. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than projected climate change impacts for most species, suggesting that reductions in fire severity, and resultant impacts on seed availability, could partially offset expected climate-driven declines in postfire regeneration. Across 40 to 42% of the study area, we project postfire conifer regeneration to be likely following low-severity but not high-severity fire under future climate scenarios (2031 to 2050). However, increasingly warm, dry climate conditions are projected to eventually outweigh the influence of fire severity and seed availability. The percent of the study area considered unlikely to experience conifer regeneration, regardless of fire severity, increased from 5% in 1981 to 2000 to 26 to 31% by mid-century, highlighting a limited time window over which management actions that reduce fire severity may effectively support postfire conifer regeneration.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.