Refuge-yeah or refuge-nah? Predicting locations of forest resistance and recruitment in a fiery world

Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth’s biota. Fire refugia – locations that are disturbed less frequently or severely than their surroundings – may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post-fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their potential value to forest ecosystems, there is an urgent need to anticipate (1) where refugia are most likely to be found and (2) where they align with environmental conditions that support post-fire tree recruitment. Using biophysical predictors and patterns of burn severity from 1,180 recent fire events, we mapped the locations of potential fire refugia across upland conifer forests in the southwestern United States (US) (99,428 km2 of forest area), a region that is highly vulnerable to fire-driven transformation. We found that low pre-fire forest cover, flat slopes or topogra..., This archive includes statistical models and spatial data used to predict the locations of forested fire refugia and post-fire tree recruitment potential throughout four ecoregions (EPA Level III Ecoregions #19, 21, 23, and 79) in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, USA.
See \"README.md\" for information about datasets and their collection., We place no restrictions on the use of the newly developed data or code included in this archive. Open-source R and R Studio software are necessary to reproduce our analyses.
Several of the datasets included in this archive were derived from external sources (e.g., USGS 3DEP topographic data, GridMET climate data, Landsat imagery, MODIS/VIIRS thermal anomalies, Rangeland Analysis Platform vegetation cover, LANDFIRE vegetation type, MTBS/NIFC fire perimeters, EPA ecoregions, and USFS species basal area maps). For reproducibility, some of these datasets are redistributed in this archive. The authors confirm that these data are dedicated to the public domain, without restrictions on use.,