Feedbacks

Fires that occur in any one area can be affected by the intensity and frequency of prior fires. The vegetation that becomes the fuel needed to support a fire takes time to grow, and there may be a period of months to decades during which a previously burned area will not support any fires, or will be able to support only small fires. Furthermore, previously burned areas, because they lack fuel, act as natural fire-breaks. An ecosystem prior to and after a fire may be different because of other reasons: forest management practices may have changed (for example, because of decades of forest management practices, forests throughout the Western U.S. have accumulated more fuel and caused an increase in the severity of fires¹), and climate change may cause a climate-vegetation mismatch so that after a fire occurs different species will colonize the area (Hill et al. 2023 and Davis et al. 2019), thus changing the characteristics of any subsequent fires.