Abstract
•Fire effects on tree growth quantified using fire behavior and repeat ALS data.•Height growth was reduced in trees exposed to greater max FRP and rate of spread.•Link between max FRP and reduced tree growth is consistent with prior studies.•Reduced growth eight years post-fire highlights persistence of fire impacts.
Methods that integrate pre-, active-, and post-fire measurements to quantify fire effects across multiple spatial scales are needed to improve our understanding of ecological effects following fire and for informing natural resource management decisions that rely on post-fire growth and yield estimates. Given growth and yield modeling systems require tree level measurements to parameterize diameter and height distributions, effective datasets require both tree and stand level characterization. However, most stand-to-landscape scale fire effects studies use optical multispectral data (e.g., 30 m spatial resolution Landsat data) which are too coarse to quantify tree-level effects and is limited in its ability to quantify changes in forest structure. Most studies also fail to integrate active fire behavior observations, such as heat flux, limiting their ability to identify mechanisms of tree injury and mortality and/or predict fire effects. Combining active fire observations and structural measurements derived from multitemporal airborne laser scanning (ALS) data has been proposed to quantify fire effects on tree structure and growth but has yet to be tested. In this pilot study, we used a combination of fire behavior and heat flux metrics, including Fire Radiative Power per unit area (FRP: W m−2) and Fire Radiative Energy per unit area (FRE: J m−2), along with multitemporal field and ALS measurements to quantify fire intensity impacts on mature tree height growth. Prescribed fires were conducted in 2014 in thinned and unthinned mature Pinus ponderosa stands and plot-scale fire behavior and heat flux metrics were quantified using standard videography methods and tower-mounted infrared radiometers. Tree height growth was quantified using multitemporal field and ALS data and included pre-fire measurements and post-fire measurements up to eight years post-fire. Results show that trees exposed to the surface fire treatments had height growth that was less than unburned trees. The results also show that height growth 5–8 years post-fire is reduced in trees exposed to greater fire intensities, in terms of maximum FRP per unit area and rate of spread. There was no significant relationship between height growth and other fire behavior metrics (FRE per unit area, average flame length, flame residence time), although height growth decreased with greater FRE per unit area and increased with greater flame residence time. These findings, taken together with similar sapling-, mature tree- and landscape-scale studies, suggest that an integrated active-fire behavior and ALS-data approach may provide a quantitative, scalable method for assessing fire effects on tree structure and growth.