查看文章

Research in the last several years has indicated that fire size and frequency are on the rise in western U.S. forests. Although fire size and frequency are important, they do not necessarily scale with ecosystem effects of fire, as different ecosystems have different ecological and evolutionary relationships with fire. Our study assessed trends and patterns in fire size and frequency from 1910 to 2008 (all fires > 40 ha), and the percentage of high‐severity in fires from 1987 to 2008 (all fires > 400 ha) on the four national forests of northwestern California. During 1910–2008, mean and maximum fire size and total annual area burned increased, but we found no temporal trend in the percentage of high‐severity fire during 1987–2008. The time series of severity data was strongly influenced by four years with region‐wide lightning events that burned huge areas at primarily low–moderate severity. Regional fire rotation reached …