Snags, standing dead trees, are becoming more abundant in forests as tree mortality rates continue to increase due to fire, drought, and bark beetles. Snags provide habitat for birds and small mammals, and when they fall to the ground, the resulting logs provide additional wildlife habitat and affect nutrient cycling, fuel loads, and fire behavior. Predicting how long snags will remain standing after fire is essential for managing habitat, understanding chemical cycling in forests, and modeling forest succession and fuels. Few studies, however, have quantified how fire changes snag fall dynamics.
We compared post-fire fall rates of snags that existed pre-fire (
Land managers should expect fall rates of pre-existing snags to exceed fall rates of new snags within 5 years after fire, an important habitat consideration because pre-existing snags represent a wider range of size and decay classes.