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Wildfires are a significant agent of disturbance in forests and highly sensitive to climate change. Short-interval fires and high severity (mortality-causing) fires in particular, may catalyze rapid and substantial ecosystem shifts by eliminating woody species and triggering conversions from forest to shrub or grassland ecosystems. Modeling and fine-scale observations suggest negative feedbacks between fire and fuels should limit reburn prevalence as overall fire frequency rises. However, while we have good information on reburning patterns for individual fires or small regions, the validity of scaling these conclusions to broad regions like the US West remains unknown. Both the prevalence of reburning and the strength of feedbacks on likelihood of reburning over differing timescales have not been documented at the regional scale. Here we show that while there is a strong negative feedback for very short reburning intervals throughout wildland forests of the Western US, that feedback weakens after 10–20 years. The relationship between reburning intervals and drought diverges depending on location, with coastal systems reburning quicker (e.g. shorter interval between fires) in wetter conditions and interior forests in drier. This supports the idea that vegetation productivity—primarily fine fuels that accumulate rapidly (<10 years)—is of primary importance in determining reburn intervals. Our results demonstrate that while over short time intervals increasing fires inhibits reburning at broad scales, that breaks down after a decade. This provides important insights about patterns at very broad scales and agrees with finer scale work, suggesting that lessons from those scales apply across the entire western US.

 

Climate drivers are increasingly creating conditions conducive to higher frequency fires. In the coniferous boreal forest, the world’s largest terrestrial biome, fires are historically common but relatively infrequent. Post-fire, regenerating forests are generally resistant to burning (strong fire self-regulation), favoring millennial coniferous resilience. However, short intervals between fires are associated with rapid, threshold-like losses of resilience and changes to broadleaf or shrub communities, impacting carbon content, habitat, and other ecosystem services. Fires burning the same location 2 + times comprise approximately 4% of all Alaskan boreal fire events since 1984, and the fraction of short-interval events (< 20 years between fires) is increasing with time. While there is strong resistance to burning for the first decade after a fire, from 10 to 20 years post-fire resistance appears to decline. Reburning is biased towards coniferous forests and in areas with seasonally variable precipitation, and that proportion appears to be increasing with time, suggesting continued forest shifts as changing climatic drivers overwhelm the resistance of early postfire landscapes to reburning. As area burned in large fire years of ~ 15 years ago begin to mature, there is potential for more widespread shifts, which should be evaluated closely to understand finer grained patterns within this regional trend.