Abstract
In recent years, warming climate and increased fire activity have raised concern about post-fire recovery of western U.S. forests. We assessed relationships between climate variability and tree establishment after fire in dry ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Front Range. We harvested and aged over 400 post-fire juvenile ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees using an improved tree-ring based approach that yielded annually-resolved dates and then assessed relationships between climate variability and pulses of tree establishment. We found that tree establishment was largely concentrated in years of above-average moisture availability in the growing season, including higher amounts of precipitation and more positive values of the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Under continued climate change, drier conditions associated with warming temperatures may limit forest recovery after fire, which could result in lower stand densities or shifts to non-forested vegetation in some areas.
Highlights
In ecology, resiliency can be defined as the ability of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance without transitioning into a qualitatively different ecosystem type [1,2]
Climate change is most likely to interfere with regeneration processes in forest types that are at the edges of where climate is optimal for the dominant tree species [14], such as at lower treeline or at lower latitudinal limits of species distributions
Our study indicates that following wildfires of the late 1980s to early 2000s, ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir establishment in the lower montane zone of the Colorado Front Range was largely concentrated in years of above-average moisture availability
Summary
Resiliency can be defined as the ability of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance without transitioning into a qualitatively different ecosystem type [1,2]. Climate change is most likely to interfere with regeneration processes in forest types that are at the edges of where climate is optimal for the dominant tree species [14], such as at lower treeline or at lower latitudinal limits of species distributions. In these more vulnerable settings, fire can act as a catalyst to rapid changes that would otherwise occur more gradually. This is especially true following higher-severity fire which removes large numbers of live
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