Published In

Landscape Ecology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-15-2025

Subjects

Forest -- ecology, Wildfires -- research

Abstract

Context Ecological functions provided by fire refugia are critical for supporting conifer forest resiliency under increased fire activity across the western United States. The spatial distribution and persistence of fire refugia over time are uncertain as fire-injured trees continue to die over subsequent years post-fire. Objectives We examined how post-fire delayed tree mortality affects the spatial distribution and attributes of fire refugia at patch and landscape scales following high-severity wildfires. Methods To explore changes in fire refugia patch size, isolation, and fragmentation over time, we used high-resolution satellite imagery (3 m pixel size) following high-severity fires in Oregon’s western Cascades to map annual changes in the extent of live tree cover up to 3 years post-fire. Results Delayed mortality decreased live forest cover across all fire perimeters by 8.5% between 1 month and 3 years post-fire. Though prevalent across all forest types, adult to mature and fire-sensitive conifer species were the most vulnerable to delayed mortality. The number of refugia patches decreased by ca. 20%, and most (ca. 77%) were small, non-core patches (<  60 m from the patch edge). In response to delayed mortality, which increased the extent of high-severity burned areas by 9% (ca. 12,000 ha), the area with little to no seed sources based on refugia distance2-weighted density increased by 375% (7632 ha). Conclusions Delayed mortality altered the size and spatial configuration of fire refugia across landscapes. Considering species-specific fire adaptations may help improve post-fire management strategies and a framework of conifer forest resiliency under novel fire regimes.

Rights

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Locate the Document

https://doi-org/10.1007/s10980-025-02111-2

DOI

10.1007/s10980-025-02111-2

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43746

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

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Geography Commons

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