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Forest Vegetation Change and Its Impacts on Soil Water Following 47 Years of Managed Wildfire

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Abstract

Managed wildfire is an increasingly relevant management option to restore variability in vegetation structure within fire-suppressed montane forests in western North America. Managed wildfire often reduces tree cover and density, potentially leading to increases in soil moisture availability, water storage in soils and groundwater, and streamflow. However, the potential hydrologic impacts of managed wildfire in montane watersheds remain uncertain and are likely context dependent. Here, we characterize the response of vegetation and soil moisture to 47 years (1971–2018) of managed wildfire in Sugarloaf Creek Basin (SCB) in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, using repeat plot measurements, remote sensing of vegetation, and a combination of continuous in situ and episodic spatially distributed soil moisture measurements. We find that, by comparison to a nearby watershed with higher vegetation productivity and greater fire frequency, the managed wildfire regime at SCB caused relatively little change in dominant vegetation over the 47 year period and relatively little response of soil moisture. Fire occurrence was limited to drier mixed-conifer sites; fire-caused overstory tree mortality patches were generally less than 10 ha, and fires had little effect on removing mid- and lower strata trees. Few dense meadow areas were created by fire, with most forest conversion leading to sparse meadow and shrub areas, which had similar soil moisture profiles to nearby mixed-conifer vegetation. Future fires in SCB could be managed to encourage greater tree mortality adjacent to wetlands to increase soil moisture, although the potential hydrologic benefits of the program in drier basins such as this one may be limited.

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Acknowledgments

Field work assistance was provided by K. Collins, M. Goering, J. Levine, L. Nitsan, C. Phillips, and A. Welsh. Imagery analysis assistance was provided by J. Ngyuen, L. Nitsan, and S. Tang. A. C. Caprio provided helpful information on the managed fire program at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. Z. L. Steel provided helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank J. van Wagtendonk for discussions on fire dynamics in these basins. This work was supported by the U.S. Joint Fire Science Program (Grant Number 14-1-06-22); the National Science Foundation EAR (Grant Number 1013339); Sigma Xi Grants in Aid of Research; the UC Berkeley SMART program; the Hellman Fellows Program; the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources competitive grant program; and the UC Berkeley Philomathia Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Sciences. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Geological Survey, New Mexico Landscapes Field Station, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87508, USA

    Jens T. Stevens

  2. Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Jens T. Stevens, Gabrielle F. S. Boisramé, Brandon M. Collins & Scott L. Stephens

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Gabrielle F. S. Boisramé, Ekaterina Rakhmatulina & Sally E. Thompson

  4. Division of Hydrologic Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89119, USA

    Gabrielle F. S. Boisramé

  5. Department of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, 6009, Australia

    Sally E. Thompson

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Correspondence to Jens T. Stevens.

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Author Contributions

JS, GB, ST, and SS conceived of and designed the study; JS, GB, and ER conducted field research; JS, GB, ER, and BC analyzed data; JS, GB, ER, BC, ST, and SS wrote the paper.

Model and Data Archiving: Data and code used to produce this paper are available via USGS ScienceBase at https://doi.org/10.5066/P92I6JZQ.

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Stevens, J.T., Boisramé, G.F.S., Rakhmatulina, E. et al. Forest Vegetation Change and Its Impacts on Soil Water Following 47 Years of Managed Wildfire. Ecosystems 23, 1547–1565 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-020-00489-5

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