Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States

The combination of increasing fire-caused tree mortality and warmer, drier post-fire conditions is making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a novel dataset of post-fire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Post-fire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and post-fire climate, which influences seedling establishment and survival. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than proj..., This archive includes field data and various spatial datasets used in Davis et al. (2023). 
Individual datasets in the Dryad archive include the following:
1) Field data. This data includes post-fire regeneration density for eight conifer species from the western US that were surveyed in plots 2–30 years following fire. Predictors that were used in the manuscript \"Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States\" are included with each plot including climate data, fire severity, heat insolation load index, surrounding tree cover, and distance to nearest live seed source. The dataset is a compilation of many datasets. The field methods performed to collect the data varied by dataset/study and are described in detail in each individual study. For a list of the publications that produced each individual dataset please see the supplemental information Table S1 from Davis et al. 2023, the provided .csv file called...,