Next Thursday Max Moritz: Fire ecology and moving toward “desired future outcomes”
Camila Vargas Poulsen
While most wildfire predictions under climate change tend to show increasing fire activity in many regions, this is not always the case. For example, some future projections of climate (e.g., warm and wet conditions) may tend to predict more fire in fuel-limited ecosystems (e.g., lower productivity deserts) and less fire in fuel-rich ecosystems (e.g., higher productivity forests). Furthermore, some land management and conservation planning decisions depend on estimating specific characteristics of future fire activity (e.g., fire intensities, sizes, frequencies), often dependent on how future plant communities may shift. Therefore, knowledge of fire-promoting or fire-hindering weather and climate only tells us part of the story. Due to such knowledge gaps, identifying desired future conditions is often an important step in adaptation planning to make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty about future wildfire patterns.