![]() ![]() ![]() In absence of low- to moderate-severity fires, contemporary forests are dense with closed canopies that are vulnerable to high-severity fire. Rather, the post-1863 cohorts persisted due disruption of the fire regime in the twentieth century when land-use shifted from Indigenous fire stewardship and early European settler fires to fire exclusion and suppression. In our study area, the most widespread and severe fire was not a stand-initiating fire. Many studies consider fires in the late 1800s relatively severe because they generated new cohorts of trees, and thus, emphasize the importance of high-severity fires in a mixed-severity fire regime. These results indicate the severity of fires varied at fine spatial scales, and offer little support for the common assertion that periodic, high-severity, stand-initiating events were a component of the mixed-severity fire regime in these forest types. Of the six widespread fires from 1790 to 1905, the 1863 fire affected 86% of plots and was moderate in severity with patches of higher severity that generated cohorts at fine scales only. In contrast, current fire-free intervals of 70–180 years exceed historical maximum intervals. The 23 fires between 16 burned at intervals of 10–30 years, primarily at low- to moderate-severity that scarred trees but generated few cohorts. Our dendroecological reconstructions of 35 plots in a 161-hectare study area in a dry Douglas-fir forest revealed historical fires that burned at a wide range of frequencies and severities at both the plot- and study-area scales. To transform forest and fire management to achieve resilience to future megafires requires improved understanding historical fire frequency, severity, and spatial patterns. In the 20, 2.55 million hectares burned across British Columbia, Canada, including unanticipated large and high-severity fires in many dry forests. ![]() Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.Daniels * Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz Jennifer N. ![]()
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