Sponsor
A.M. was supported in part by an appointment to the United States Forest Service (USFS) Research Participation Program administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). AH was partially supported by National Science Foundation award # 1738104.
Published In
Fire
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2020
Subjects
Wildfires -- research, Wildfire risk -- United States
Abstract
Characterizing wildfire regimes where wildfires are uncommon is challenged by a lack of empirical information. Moreover, climate change is projected to lead to increasingly frequent wildfires and additional annual area burned in forests historically characterized by long fire return intervals. Western Oregon and Washington, USA (westside) have experienced few large wildfires (fires greater than 100 hectares) the past century and are characterized to infrequent large fires with return intervals greater than 500 years. We evaluated impacts of climate change on wildfire hazard in a major urban watershed outside Portland, OR, USA. We simulated wildfire occurrence and fire regime characteristics under contemporary conditions (1992–2015) and four mid-century (2040–2069) scenarios using Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. Simulated mid-century fire seasons expanded in most scenarios, in some cases by nearly two months. In all scenarios, average fire size and frequency projections increased significantly. Fire regime characteristics under the hottest and driest mid-century scenarios illustrate novel disturbance regimes which could result in permanent changes to forest structure and composition and the provision of ecosystem services. Managers and planners can use the range of modeled outputs and simulation results to inform robust strategies for climate adaptation and risk mitigation.
Rights
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.3390/fire3040070
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34508
Citation Details
McEvoy, A., Nielsen-Pincus, M., Holz, A., Catalano, A. J., & Gleason, K. E. (2020). Projected Impact of Mid-21st Century Climate Change on Wildfire Hazard in a Major Urban Watershed outside Portland, Oregon USA. Fire, 3(4), 70.