RECOVERING RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE TO WILDFIRE: LEARNING FROM NATIVE ECOSYSTEMS

How can our communities and our environment be resilient and resistant to disturbances like wildfire? Those of us in the Western US live and work in places that have burned in the past and will likely burn sometime in the future. One thing is certain, wildfire is not going away. Historically, western landscapes reflected regional wildfire regimes that created diverse and productive terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Wildfires, ignited by natural events or deliberately by native Peoples, contributed to the suite of processes that affected ecosystem composition and function over short and long time frames. Oak savannahs and prairies, as well as the complex mosaic of age classes in established forests, reflected regionally unique combinations of disturbance processes and climate. Modern human communities and ways of living tend to work against the natural processes that formed and sustained the dynamic native ecosystems that were resistant and resilient to wildfire. Over the past century, effective wildfire suppression, combined with a shifting climate and extensive use of natural resources such as forests and rangeland, have transformed diverse, wildfire-resilient ecosystems in much of the country. Novel, and often simplified, ecosystems that are not inherently resistant to wildfire have emerged, altering the size, severity, and intensity of future burns. Thus, historic fire regimes may no longer be a predictor of the intensity or size of modern wildfire events. Additionally, the types of forests and ecosystems that emerge after wildfire may not be the same as what burned, reflecting new realities of climate and associated precipitation regimes. Water quality may also be affected by wildfire, reflecting higher severity burns and impacts on soils. In this presentation, some of the natural mechanisms that made and can still make native ecosystems resilient to wildfire will be reviewed. Nature may offer ways for our human communities to be resilient to wildfire as well.