Climate will increasingly determine post-fire tree regeneration success in low-elevation forests, Northern Rockies, USA

Climate change is expected to cause widespread shifts in the distribution and abundance of plant species through direct impacts on mortality, regeneration, and survival. At landscape scales, climate impacts will be strongly mediated by disturbances, such as wildfire, which catalyze shifts in species distributions through widespread mortality and by shaping the post‐disturbance environment. We examined the potential for regional shifts in low‐elevation tree species in response to wildfire and climate warming in low‐elevation, dry mixed‐conifer forests of the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. We analyzed interactions among climate and wildfire on post‐fire tree seedling regeneration 5–13 yr post‐fire at 177 sites burned in 21 large wildfires during two years with widespread regional burning. We used generalized additive mixed models to quantify how the density of Douglas‐fir and ponderosa pine seedlings varied as a function of climate normals (30‐yr mean temperature, precipitation, soil mois...