Fire in the Past, Present, and Future
Fire is one of the most powerful forces shaping ecosystems and communities across North America and the globe, and understanding the process requires looking far beyond the last few fire seasons. The PaleoEcology & Fire Ecology Lab investigates the causes and consequences of fires across time — from decades to millennia — and across space, from individual forest stands to entire biomes. With roots in paleoecology and expertise in forest and fire ecology, our research connects the deep past to the present to anticipate what fire-prone landscapes face in a rapidly changing world. Students in the lab have gained hands-on training in field methods, laboratory analysis, and quantitative modeling, contributing to work that informs land management, conservation, and environmental and natural resource policy.
87 peer-reviewed publications | 18,000+ total citations | Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, 2025 | Funded mainly by the National Science Foundation, Joint Fire Science Program, and USGS | Field sites from the Rocky Mountains to the Arctic
Research themes
Post-fire forest recovery in western North America
Rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and increasingly severe wildfires are testing the capacity of western coniferous forests to recover after fire. We use post-fire field surveys, remote sensing, climate records, and demographic models to ask whether — and under what conditions — forests regenerate or give way to shrublands and grasslands. Our research has shown that climate change is pushing many low-elevation forests past a critical threshold for tree regeneration, and that reducing fire severity can offer a meaningful near-term buffer against those losses.
Long-term fire history from paleoecological records
To know whether today's fire activity is truly unprecedented, we need records that extend far beyond the period of direct observation. We use charcoal preserved in lake sediments, alongside pollen, stable isotopes, and tree-ring records, to reconstruct fire histories spanning thousands of years across Rocky Mountain subalpine forests, Alaskan boreal forests, and Arctic tundra ecosystems. Our reconstructions highlight the stong links among fire, climate, and vegetation, and some have revealed how systems are now burning more than any time in recent millennia.
Social-ecological resilience to wildfire
Wildfires don't just reshape ecosystems, they reshape communities, economies, and institutions. This research bridges ecology and social science to understand how human decisions, land use, and fire management shape wildfire risk, and how communities can adapt to change. Our work has documented how human ignitions and expanding development in fire-prone areas drive increasing rates of home loss, and how decades of aggressive fire suppression have amplified the severity of today's wildfires.
Combining paleoecological records with fire and ecosystem models
Approaches
We bring together lake sediment records, tree-ring chronologies, satellite imagery, observational fire databases, and quantitative modeling, linking archives spanning the past 15,000 years with data from the most recent fire seasons. All of this work has been deeply collaborative, involving scientists with complementary expertise in fire ecology, fire behavior modeling, social science, field ecology, statistical analysis, and ecosystem modeling. These partnerships have been central to the breadth and impact of the Lab's research.
Where we work
Our field sites span the western United States, the Rocky Mountains, and Alaska, reflecting the broad geographic scope of questions about fire across ecosystems of western North America.