Federal and other natural resource managers in the United States are now required to consider climate change in their planning. Wildland fire is a major component included in many of these planning efforts. Fire is a widespread ecosystem disturbance process that is global in scope with local to regional, event driven, resource and societal impacts. The frequency, severity and extent of Wildland fires are largely a function of interactions between vegetation and atmospheric processes. Fire activity and management costs have increased significantly over the last few decades. There is growing evidence that these increases relate to measured changes in climate variables. Our understanding of fire history, fire regimes, and past interactions between fire and climate has grown substantially in recent years. Fire regimes provide a context for interpreting fire history to facilitate our understanding of fire in relation to climate and other factors, and provide a bridge between ecosystem characteristics and climate change projections. The challenge is to provide managers with placed-based information about fire and climate change, involving multiple scales of atmospheric and ecosystem process interaction, that they can use for planning and communication purposes.
Results/Conclusions
We present results of an on going study that integrates fire history, fire regime, and climate change information in formats designed for use by managers in their climate change planning efforts. A representative group of land managers reviewed our proposed information structure in an interactive workshop setting, and provided recommendations for how to make this information accessible and useful to them. We characterize atmospheric scales of importance to fire as the climate change, climate variability, and event scales. These relate to long-term evolution of vegetation, seasonal to decadal drought, and fire events. We use Bailey's vegetation classification at various ecosystem scales to organize the fire history and fire regime information. Bailey classifications also serve as a bridge to LANDFIRE components, such as the Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC), and as a link to GCM-based climate projections. In addition to reporting overall findings, we present examples o f specific place-based information for representative ecosystems in different areas of the United States.