Perspectives: The pace and scale challenge: Leveraging wildfire footprints to increase forest resilience to future high-severity fire
This study presents a framework for leveraging recent wildfire footprints to increase resistance to high‑severity fire in California’s Sierra Nevada forests. By identifying opportunities to create, enhance, and maintain fire‑resistant landscapes, the work highlights cost‑effective strategies that reduce risk, support biodiversity, and promote resilient fire regimes.
Subject Tags
- Forest
- Fire management
- Wildlife
Abstract
In historically frequent fire forests, wildfires are burning larger areas and driving forest loss across western North America, yet they also produce extensive low- to moderate-severity effects that can be leveraged to harden landscapes against future high-severity fire. Here, we operationalize prior conceptual calls by presenting a framework that identifies opportunities to leverage recent wildfire footprints via three management pathways to increasing resistance to high-severity fire: create (use burned edges as containment lines to treat adjacent unburned forest), enhance (apply mechanical treatment and prescribed fire or wildfire managed for resource objectives to areas with one prior beneficial disturbance), and maintain (sustain high-resistance stands with recurring fire). We quantify the extent of these opportunities across California’s Sierra Nevada yellow pine-mixed conifer forests at the Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) scale and outline policy options to act within limited post-fire windows. This work can support increasing resistance to high-severity fire across the landscape, highlighting how leveraging wildfire has the potential to save time and money, lower operational risk under suitable conditions, and promote pyrodiversity and biodiversity.
Citation
Wilson, K. N., Shive, K. L., Williams, J. N., North, M. P., Coppoletta, M., Hendershot, J. N., & Stanley, C. K. (2026). Perspectives: The pace and scale challenge: Leveraging wildfire footprints to increase forest resilience to future high-severity fire. Forest Ecology and Management, 603, 123443.
TNC Authors
-
Kristen N. Wilson
Lead Forest Scientist. California
The Nature Conservancy
Email: kristen.wilson@tnc.org -
John N. Williams
Fire Ecologist. California
The Nature Conservancy
Email: john.williams@tnc.org -
Nicholas Hendershot
Forest Ecologist, Northern California. California
The Nature Conservancy
Email: n.hendershot@tnc.org -
Charlotte K. Stanley
Spatial Data Analyst. California
The Nature Conservancy
Email: c.k.stanley@tnc.org