Download or read book Post-Fire Tree Mortality and Regeneration Patterns as Proxies of Conifer Forest Resilience written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shifting wildfire patterns and climate conditions, magnified by anthropogenic climate change, are threatening the resilience of conifer forests in North America and more specifically, the western US. If native conifer species are functionally maladapted to novel fire patterns and post-fire climate conditions, large-scale shifts in conifer forest structure, composition, and extent may occur as warming intensifies. Forest resilience in the context of fire and climate can be understood and quantified by the survival of trees through fire events and success of trees to regenerate post-fire and maintain population levels. In this dissertation, I use field observations and remote sensing to examine patterns of fire-induced tree mortality and post-fire tree regeneration as proxies of conifer forest resilience in the western US, across a range of environments and forest types, and particularly within the context of expansive high-severity, stand-replacing wildfires. In Chapter 1, I evaluate the interactions between climate-environment conditions and the spatial, structural, and temporal characteristics of fire refugia as drivers of subalpine forest recovery in the cool and moist Cascade Range of Oregon and Washington. In Chapter 2, I quantify large-scale patterns of post-fire delayed conifer tree mortality across three ecoregions and two broad forest types in the western US using high-resolution satellite imagery, and I evaluate whether post-fire delayed conifer tree mortality is a ubiquitous process across broad geographies, and if so, I ask i) what drives it? and ii) can it meaningfully affect seed dispersal and thus forest regeneration processes? Finally, in Chapter 3, I use an aggregated database of post-fire conifer establishment responses, across over 1800 sites and four ecoregions in the western US, to challenge the generalized notion that conifer species' shade-tolerance dictates their regenerative capacity within exposed early seral post-fire environments.