Leveraging wildfire to augment forest management and amplify forest resilience

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity, but the probability of high severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies have committed significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, wildfires also have the potential to act as “treatments” in areas that burn at lower severity, but even catastrophic fires with large areas of high severity can still have substantial area of lower severity fire that may be improving forest conditions. We quantified active management and wildfire severity across yellow pine and mixed conifer forests (YPMC) in the Sierra Nevada of California over a 22-year period (2001-2022). We did not detect clear increases in the area t..., As detailed in the manuscript, we acquried publicly available data from a variety of sources and created fire severity maps for 2018-2022 via Google Earth Engine., , # Leveraging wildfire to augment forest management and amplify forest resilience

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m7d](10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m7d)

## Description of the data and file structure

This file describes the data and code available for the publication: \"Leveraging wildfire to augment forest management and amplify forest resilience,\" abstract below. Note that the workflow can be found in the README_Workflow.txt.

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity. The probability of high severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies to commit significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, lower-severity areas of wildfires also have the potential t...,