By disrupting wildfire regimes, climate and land use change transform ecosystems, alter carbon budgets, and drive socio-economic impacts in California. We propose to quantify how projected peri-urban growth in the wildland urban interface, climate change, and local management actions influence wildfire activity and downstream effects on vegetation transitions, carbon release, biodiversity, and vulnerable human communities. We will model wildfire risk as a function of a limited set of stakeholder-guided, realistic future scenarios, using the LANDIS-II simulation model. Past studies have shown the importance of human ignition in areas with low-density residential development on wildfire in Southern California, a mechanism we will explore using different land use change scenarios. Recent studies have shown that increasing aridity in Western US forests have led to large, high severity fires, a phenomenon we will implement in the model. Because forest succession is also influenced by climate, we propose to implement more realistic recruitment as a function of recent work showing that forest regeneration is occurring only in a subset of the climate space where adult trees currently exist. Taken together, climate and fire can produce vegetation type transitions, which can influence carbon sequestration and vegetation type transitions. Finally, we will explicitly evaluate how different forest management influences wildfire, forest succession, and carbon sequestration. The resulting maps and spatial products will help managers prioritize locations for conservation and management actions. Overlaying maps of vulnerable human communities and biodiversity hotspots with future wildfire change and downstream impacts can better define locations for priority action to protect co-benefits to human and natural resources. This research will contribute to scientific publications and be directly relevant to managers, including the Southern California Montane Forests Project.

Contact Information:

Erin Conlisk, PhD (PI)
econlisk@pointblue.org

CAL FIRE Forest Health Research Program
FHResearch@fire.ca.gov