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Wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs), the juxtaposition of highly and minimally developed lands, are an increasingly prominent feature on Earth. WUIs are hotspots of environmental and ecological change that are often priority areas for planning and management. A better understanding of WUI dynamics and their role in the coupling between cities and surrounding wildlands is needed to reduce the risk of environmental hazards, ensure the continued provisioning of ecosystem services, and conserve threatened biodiversity. To fill this need, we propose an expanded framework for WUIs that not only conceptualizes these interfaces as emergent and functional components of socioecological processes but also extends them vertically from the bedrock to the top of the vegetation and horizontally across heterogeneous landscapes. This framework encourages management that reconciles pervasive trade-offs between development and resulting multiple environmental impacts. Focusing on southern California as a case study, we use the framework to facilitate integration across disciplines and between scientists and managers.

Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical changes to ecosystems, fire danger is increasing, and fires are having increasingly devastating impacts on human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem services. Increasing fire danger is a vexing problem that requires deep transdisciplinary, trans-sector, and inclusive partnerships to address. Here, we outline barriers and opportunities in the next generation of fire science and provide guidance for investment in future research. We synthesize insights needed to better address the long-standing challenges of innovation across disciplines to (i) promote coordinated research efforts; (ii) embrace different ways of knowing and knowledge generation; (iii) promote exploration of fundamental science; (iv) capitalize on the "firehose" of data for societal benefit; and (v) integrate human and natural systems into models across multiple scales. Fire science is thus at a critical transitional moment. We need to shift from observation and modeled representations of varying components of climate, people, vegetation, and fire to more integrative and predictive approaches that support pathways toward mitigating and adapting to our increasingly flammable world, including the utilization of fire for human safety and benefit. Only through overcoming institutional silos and accessing knowledge across diverse communities can we effectively undertake research that improves outcomes in our more fiery future.

Agencies are busy within California developing prioritization strategies to increase the pace and scale of forest treatment in an effort to reduce damage to ecosystems and people by large severe wildfire. A tacit assumption of this effort is that building forest resilience to wildfire will resolve California’s extreme wildfire challenge. Specifically, the management focus is on coniferous forests where there is abundant evidence of increased tree density and a history of timber production. However, much of the state is covered by non-forested ecosystems, which is also where a lot of structure loss has occurred. We use more than twenty years of wildfire data in California to identify the relative proportion of wildfire area, ignitions and the number of structures destroyed by wildfire categorized by vegetation type. Using five general categories of vegetation (annual dominated, shrubland, woodland, mixed hardwood forest and coniferous forest) we show that a majority of area burned, ignitions and the vast majority of structures damaged by wildfire occur in vegetation types other than coniferous forests. Comprising 19% of the vegetation of California, coniferous forests garner the lion’s share of interest in management strategies to reduce the adverse impacts of wildfire. Simply summary statistics clearly show, however, that most of the damage from fire is in systems where forest management is not likely to result in increased wildfire resilience.

Autumn and winter Santa Ana wind (SAW)-driven wildfires play a substantial role in area burned and societal losses in southern California. Temperature during the event and antecedent precipitation in the week or month prior play a minor role in determining area burned. Burning is dependent on wind intensity and number of human-ignited fires. Over 75% of all SAW events generate no fires; rather, fires during a SAW event are dependent on a fire being ignited. Models explained 40 to 50% of area burned, with number of ignitions being the strongest variable. One hundred percent of SAW fires were human caused, and in the past decade, powerline failures have been the dominant cause. Future fire losses can be reduced by greater emphasis on maintenance of utility lines and attention to planning urban growth in ways that reduce the potential for powerline ignitions.

We review the roles that plant species traits and biogeography play in species’ exposure and vulnerability to decline or extinction under global change, focusing on separate and combined impacts of multiple threats – climate change, land-use change, and altered disturbance regimes. We establish a conceptual framework and research agenda for identifying the spatial characteristics of species ranges, as well as the life history and functional traits, that are associated with extinction risk for plant species with functional attributes emblematic of fire-prone, winter-precipitation Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs). MTEs worldwide are characterized by their high plant diversity and unique floras, historical and contemporary high rates of land use change, and strong interactions between climate, fire, and land use. We focus on the California Floristic Province (CFP), an MTE that is a global plant diversity hotspot, and show how our framework can be used to understand the relationships between vulnerability to multiple global change drivers, species traits, and biogeography. Vulnerability can be assessed across species using linked distribution and population models that forecast plant responses to global change scenarios. Our overarching hypothesis is that species-specific vulnerability to global change in MTEs is a function of interactions between species and spatial traits: the nature of this interaction will depend on the type of global change process.

Climate and land use patterns are expected to change dramatically in the coming century, raising concern about their effects on wildfire patterns and subsequent impacts to human communities. The relative influence of climate versus land use on fires and their impacts, however, remains unclear, particularly given the substantial geographical variability in fire-prone places like California. We developed a modeling framework to compare the importance of climatic and human variables for explaining fire patterns and structure loss for three diverse California landscapes, then projected future large fire and structure loss probability under two different climate (hot-dry or warm-wet) and two different land use (rural or urban residential growth) scenarios. The relative importance of climate and housing pattern varied across regions and according to fire size or whether the model was for large fires or structure loss. The differing strengths of these relationships, in addition to differences in the nature and magnitude of projected climate or land use change, dictated the extent to which large fires or structure loss were projected to change in the future. Despite this variability, housing and human infrastructure were consistently more responsible for explaining fire ignitions and structure loss probability, whereas climate, topography, and fuel variables were more important for explaining large fire patterns. For all study areas, most structure loss occurred in areas with low housing density (from 0.08 to 2.01 units/ha), and expansion of rural residential land use increased structure loss probability in the future. Regardless of future climate scenario, large fire probability was only projected to increase in the northern and interior parts of the state, whereas climate change had no projected impact on fire probability in southern California. Given the variation in fire-climate relationships and land use effects, policy and management decision-making should be customized for specific geographical regions.

An increasing amount of California's landscape has burned in wildfires in recent decades, in conjunction with increasing temperatures and vapor pressure deficit due to climate change. As the wildland-urban interface expands, more people are exposed to and harmed by these extensive wildfires, which are also eroding the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems. With future wildfire activity expected to increase, there is an urgent demand for solutions that sustain healthy ecosystems and wildfire-resilient human communities. Those who manage disaster response, landscapes, and biodiversity rely on mapped projections of how fire activity may respond to climate change and other human factors. California wildfire is complex, however, and climate-fire relationships vary across the state. Given known geographical variability in drivers of fire activity, we asked whether the geographical extent of fire models used to create these projections may alter the interpretation of predictions. We compared models of fire occurrence spanning the entire state of California to models developed for individual ecoregions and then projected end-of-century future fire patterns under climate change scenarios. We trained a Maximum Entropy model with fire records and hydroclimatological variables from recent decades (1981 to 2010) as well as topographic and human infrastructure predictors. Results showed substantial variation in predictors of fire probability and mapped future projections of fire depending upon geographical extents of model boundaries. Only the ecoregion models, accounting for the unique patterns of vegetation, climate, and human infrastructure, projected an increase in fire in most forested regions of the state, congruent with predictions from other studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Autumn and winter Santa Ana Winds (SAW) are responsible for the largest and most destructive wildfires in southern California. Aims: (1) To contrast fires ignited on SAW days vs non-SAW days, (2) evaluate the predictive ability of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (CFWI) for these two fire types, and (3) determine climate and weather factors responsible for the largest wildfires. Methods: CAL FIRE (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) FRAP (Fire and Resource Assessment Program) fire data were coupled with hourly climate data from four stations, and with regional indices of SAW wind speed, and with seasonal drought data from the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Key results: Fires on non-SAW days were more numerous and burned more area, and were substantial from May to October. CFWI indices were tied to fire occurrence and size for both non-SAW and SAW days, and in the days following ignition. Multiple regression models for months with the greatest area burned explained up to a quarter of variation in area burned. Conclusions: The drivers of fire size differ between non-SAW and SAW fires. The best predictor of fire size for non-SAW fires was drought during the prior 5 years, followed by a current year vapour pressure deficit. For SAW fires, wind speed followed by drought were most important. Fires ignited on Santa Ana Wind days are the largest and most destructive fires but other fires are more numerous and account for greater area burned. Fire indices on days after ignition are important predictors of fire size, but drought and wind speed are most closely tied to fire size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses and wildland vegetation meet or intermingle, and where wildfire problems are most pronounced. Here we report that the WUI in the United States grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million; 41% growth) and land area (from 581,000 to 770,000 km2; 33% growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States. The vast majority of new WUI areas were the result of new housing (97%), not related to an increase in wildland vegetation. Within the perimeter of recent wildfires (1990-2015), there were 286,000 houses in 2010, compared with 177,000 in 1990. Furthermore, WUI growth often results in more wildfire ignitions, putting more lives and houses at risk. Wildfire problems will not abate if recent housing growth trends continue.

In many parts of the world, the combined effects of habitat fragmentation and altered disturbance regimes pose a significant threat to biodiversity. This is particularly true in Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs), which tend to be fire-prone, species rich, and heavily impacted by human land use. Given the spatial complexity of overlapping threats and species' vulnerability along with limited conservation budgets, methods are needed for prioritizing areas for monitoring and management in these regions. We developed a multi-criteria Pareto ranking methodology for prioritizing spatial units for conservation and applied it to fire threat, habitat fragmentation threat, species richness, and genetic biodiversity criteria in San Diego County, California, USA. We summarized the criteria and Pareto ranking results (from west to east) within the maritime, coastal, transitional, inland climate zones within San Diego County. Fire threat increased from the maritime zone eastward to the transitional zone, then decreased in the mountainous inland climate zone. Number of fires and fire return interval departure were strongly negatively correlated. Fragmentation threats, particularly road density and development density, were highest in the maritime climate zone, declined towards the east, and were positively correlated. Species richness criteria showed distributions among climate zones similar to those of the fire threat variables. When using species richness and fire threat criteria, most lower-ranked (higher conservation priority) units occurred in the coastal and transitional zones. When considering genetic biodiversity, lower-ranked units occurred more often in the mountainous inland zone. With Pareto ranking, there is no need to select criteria weights as part of the decision-making process. However, negative correlations and larger numbers of criteria can result in more units assigned to the same rank. Pareto ranking is broadly applicable and can be used as a standalone decision analysis method or in conjunction with other methods.

Seedling establishment is a critical step that may ultimately govern tree species' distribution shifts under environmental change. Annual variation in the location of seed rain and microclimates results in transient "windows of opportunity" for tree seedling establishment across the landscape. These establishment windows vary at fine spatiotemporal scales that are not considered in most assessments of climate change impacts on tree species range dynamics and habitat displacement. We integrate field seedling establishment trials conducted in the southern Sierra Nevada and western Tehachapi Mountains of southern California with spatially downscaled grids of modeled water-year climatic water deficit (CWDwy) and mean August maximum daily temperature (Tmax) to map historical and projected future microclimates suitable for establishment windows of opportunity for Quercus douglasii, a dominant tree species of warm, dry foothill woodlands, and Q. kelloggii, a dominant of cooler, more mesic montane woodlands and forests. Based on quasi-binomial regression models, Q. douglasii seedling establishment is significantly associated with modeled CWDwy and to a lesser degree with modeled Tmax. Q. kelloggii seedling establishment is most strongly associated with Tmax and best predicted by a two-factor model including CWDwy and Tmax. Establishment niche models are applied to explore recruitment window dynamics in the western Tehachapi Mountains, where these species are currently widespread canopy dominants. Establishment windows are projected to decrease by 50-95%, shrinking locally to higher elevations and north-facing slopes by the end of this century depending on the species and climate scenario. These decreases in establishment windows suggest the potential for longer-term regional population declines of the species. While many additional processes regulate seedling establishment and growth, this study highlights the need to account for topoclimatic controls and interannual climatic variation when assessing how seedling establishment and colonization processes could be affected by climate change.

Across the Western United States, human development into the wildland urban interface (WUI) is contributing to increasing wildfire damage. Given that natural disasters often cause greater harm within socio-economically vulnerable groups, research is needed to explore the potential for disproportionate impacts associated with wildfire. Using Zillow Transaction and Assessment Database (ZTRAX), hereafter "Zillow", real estate data, we explored whether lower-priced structures were more likely to be damaged during the most destructive, recent wildfires in Southern California. Within fire perimeters occurring from 2000–2019, we matched property price data to burned and unburned structures. To be included in the final dataset, fire perimeters had to surround at least 25 burned and 25 unburned structures and have been sold at most seven years before the fire; five fires fit these criteria. We found evidence to support our hypothesis that lower-priced properties were more likely to be damaged, however, the likelihood of damage and the influence of property value significantly varied across individual fire perimeters. When considering fires individually, properties within two 2003 fires–the Cedar and Grand Prix-Old Fires–had statistically significantly decreasing burn damage with increasing property value. Occurring in 2007 and later, the other three fires (Witch-Poomacha, Thomas, and Woolsey) showed no significant relationship between price and damage. Consistent with other studies, topographic position, slope, elevation, and vegetation were also significantly associated with the likelihood of a structure being damaged during the wildfire. Driving time to the nearest fire station and previously identified fire hazard were also significant. Our results suggest that further studies on the extent and reason for disproportionate impacts of wildfire are needed. In the meantime, decision makers should consider allocating wildfire risk mitigation resources–such as fire-fighting and wildfire structural preparedness resources–to more socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Predicting climate-driven species’ range shifts depends substantially on species’ exposure to climate change. Mountain landscapes contain a wide range of topoclimates and soil characteristics that are thought to mediate range shifts and buffer species’ exposure. Quantifying fine-scale patterns of exposure across mountainous terrain is a key step in understanding vulnerability of species to regional climate change. Objectives: We demonstrated a transferable, flexible approach for mapping climate change exposure in a moisture-limited, mountainous California landscape across 4 climate change projections under phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) for mid-(2040–2069) and end-of-century (2070–2099). Methods: We produced a 149-year dataset (1951–2099) of modeled climatic water deficit (CWD), which is strongly associated with plant distributions, at 30-m resolution to map climate change exposure in the Tehachapi Mountains, California, USA. We defined climate change exposure in terms of departure from the 1951–1980 mean and historical range of variability in CWD in individual years and 3-year moving windows. Results: Climate change exposure was generally greatest at high elevations across all future projections, though we encountered moderate topographic buffering on poleward-facing slopes. Historically dry lowlands demonstrated the least exposure to climate change. Conclusions: In moisture-limited, Mediterranean-climate landscapes, high elevations may experience the greatest exposure to climate change in the 21st century. High elevation species may thus be especially vulnerable to continued climate change as habitats shrink and historically energy-limited locations become increasingly moisture-limited in the future.

Anthropogenic drivers of global change include rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses and resulting changes in the climate, as well as nitrogen deposition, biotic invasions, altered disturbance regimes, and land-use change. Predicting the effects of global change on terrestrial plant communities is crucial because of the ecosystem services vegetation provides, from climate regulation to forest products. In this paper, we present a framework for detecting vegetation changes and attributing them to global change drivers that incorporates multiple lines of evidence from spatially extensive monitoring networks, distributed experiments, remotely sensed data, and historical records. Based on a literature review, we summarize observed changes and then describe modeling tools that can forecast the impacts of multiple drivers on plant communities in an era of rapid change. Observed responses to changes in temperature, water, nutrients, land use, and disturbance show strong sensitivity of ecosystem productivity and plant population dynamics to water balance and long-lasting effects of disturbance on plant community dynamics. Persistent effects of land-use change and human-altered fire regimes on vegetation can overshadow or interact with climate change impacts. Models forecasting plant community responses to global change incorporate shifting ecological niches, population dynamics, species interactions, spatially explicit disturbance, ecosystem processes, and plant functional responses. Monitoring, experiments, and models evaluating multiple change drivers are needed to detect and predict vegetation changes in response to 21st century global change.

Aim: Forest regeneration data provide an early signal of the persistence and migration of tree species, so we investigated whether species shifts due to climate change exhibit a common signal of response or whether changes vary by species. Location: California Floristic Province, United States; mediterranean biome. Methods: We related Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data from 2000-07 for 13 tree species to high-resolution climate and geographical data. Using methods from invasion ecology, we derived indices of species-specific regeneration overlap and central tendency change (range-wide global indicators) based on kernel density estimation of presence and absence of regeneration. We then built regeneration surfaces to identify areas of occurrence of high regeneration (regeneration hotspots, local indicators) in both geographical and climate space for 13 common tree species. Results: Differences between presence and absence of regeneration in forests varied in magnitude across species, with little evidence that tree regeneration is shifting to higher latitudes and elevations, the expected geographical fingerprint of climate change. We also identified potential topographic mediators of regeneration dynamics. Multiple regeneration hotspots were found for many species, suggesting the influence of non-climatic factors on regeneration. Differences between the presence and absence of regeneration in geographic and climate spaces were not always congruent, suggesting that shifting climate space and range area are not entirely coupled. Main conclusions: The distributions of regeneration in Californian forests show diverse signals, not always tracking the higher latitudinal-elevation fingerprint of climate change. Local regeneration hotspots are common in our analysis, suggesting spatially varying persistence of forest linked to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Our results emphasize that projections of tree range shifts in the context of climate change should consider the variation of regeneration drivers within species ranges, beyond the overall climate signal.

Climate and land-use changes are projected to threaten biodiversity over this century. However, few studies have considered the spatial and temporal overlap of these threats to evaluate how ongoing land-use change could affect species ranges projected to shift outside conservation areas. We evaluated climate change and urban development effects on vegetation distribution in the Southwest ecoregion, California Floristic Province, USA. We also evaluated how well a conservation network protects suitable habitat for rare plant species under these change projections and identified primary sources of uncertainty. We used consensus-based maps from three species distribution models (SDMs) to project current and future suitable habitat for 19 species representing different functional types (defined by fire-response - obligate seeders, resprouting shrubs - and life forms - herbs, subshrubs), and range sizes (large/common, small/rare). We used one spatially explicit urban growth projection; two climate models, emission scenarios, and probability thresholds applied to SDMs; and high-resolution (90 m) environmental data. We projected that suitable habitat could disappear for 4 species and decrease for 15 by 2080. Averaged centroids of suitable habitat (all species) were projected to shift tens (up to hundreds) of kilometers. Herbs showed a small-projected response to climate change, while obligate seeders could suffer the greatest losses. Several rare species could lose suitable habitat inside conservation areas while increasing area outside. We concluded that (i) climate change is more important than urban development for vegetation habitat loss in this ecoregion through 2080 due to diminishing amounts of undeveloped private land in this region; (ii) the existing conservation plan, while extensive, may be inadequate to protect plant diversity under projected patterns of climate change and urban development, (iii) regional assessments of the dynamics of the drivers of biodiversity change based on high-resolution environmental data and consensus predictive mapping, such as this study, are necessary to identify the species expected to be the most vulnerable and to meaningfully inform regional-scale conservation. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Most species face multiple anthropogenic disruptions. Few studies have quantified the cumulative influence of multiple threats on species of conservation concern, and far fewer have quantified the potential relative value of multiple conservation interventions in light of these threats. We linked spatial distribution and population viability models to explore conservation interventions under projected climate change, urbanization, and changes in fire regime on a long-lived obligate seeding plant species sensitive to high fire frequencies, a dominant plant functional type in many fire-prone ecosystems, including the biodiversity hotspots of Mediterranean-type ecosystems. First, we investigated the relative risk of population decline for plant populations in landscapes with and without land protection under an existing habitat conservation plan. Second, we modeled the effectiveness of relocating both seedlings and seeds from a large patch with predicted declines in habitat area to 2 unoccupied recipient patches with increasing habitat area under 2 projected climate change scenarios. Finally, we modeled 8 fire return intervals (FRIs) approximating the outcomes of different management strategies that effectively control fire frequency. Invariably, long-lived obligate seeding populations remained viable only when FRIs were maintained at or above a minimum level. Land conservation and seedling relocation efforts lessened the impact of climate change and land-use change on obligate seeding populations to differing degrees depending on the climate change scenario, but neither of these efforts was as generally effective as frequent translocation of seeds. While none of the modeled strategies fully compensated for the effects of land-use and climate change, an integrative approach managing multiple threats may diminish population declines for species in complex landscapes. Conservation plans designed to mitigate the impacts of a single threat are likely to fail if additional threats are ignored.

Recent studies suggest that species distribution models (SDMs) based on fine-scale climate data may provide markedly different estimates of climate-change impacts than coarse-scale models. However, these studies disagree in their conclusions of how scale influences projected species distributions. In rugged terrain, coarse-scale climate grids may not capture topographically controlled climate variation at the scale that constitutes microhabitat or refugia for some species. Although finer scale data are therefore considered to better reflect climatic conditions experienced by species, there have been few formal analyses of how modeled distributions differ with scale. We modeled distributions for 52 plant species endemic to the California Floristic Province of different life forms and range sizes under recent and future climate across a 2000-fold range of spatial scales (0.008-16 km(2) ). We produced unique current and future climate datasets by separately downscaling 4 km climate models to three finer resolutions based on 800, 270, and 90 m digital elevation models and deriving bioclimatic predictors from them. As climate-data resolution became coarser, SDMs predicted larger habitat area with diminishing spatial congruence between fine- and coarse-scale predictions. These trends were most pronounced at the coarsest resolutions and depended on climate scenario and species' range size. On average, SDMs projected onto 4 km climate data predicted 42% more stable habitat (the amount of spatial overlap between predicted current and future climatically suitable habitat) compared with 800 m data. We found only modest agreement between areas predicted to be stable by 90 m models generalized to 4 km grids compared with areas classified as stable based on 4 km models, suggesting that some climate refugia captured at finer scales may be missed using coarser scale data. These differences in projected locations of habitat change may have more serious implications than net habitat area when predictive maps form the basis of conservation decision making.

A species' response to climate change depends on the interaction of biotic and abiotic factors that define future habitat suitability and species' ability to migrate or adapt. The interactive effects of processes such as fire, dispersal, and predation have not been thoroughly addressed in the climate change literature. Our objective was to examine how life history traits, short-term global change perturbations, and long-term climate change interact to affect the likely persistence of an oak species--Quercus engelmannii (Engelmann oak). Specifically, we combined dynamic species distribution models, which predict suitable habitat, with stochastic, stage-based metapopulation models, which project population trajectories, to evaluate the effects of three global change factors--climate change, land use change, and altered fire frequency--emphasizing the roles of dispersal and seed predation. Our model predicted dramatic reduction in Q. engelmannii abundance, especially under drier climates and increased fire frequency. When masting lowers seed predation rates, decreased masting frequency leads to large abundance decreases. Current rates of dispersal are not likely to prevent these effects, although increased dispersal could mitigate population declines. The results suggest that habitat suitability predictions by themselves may under-estimate the impact of climate change for other species and locations.