Over the last several decades, wildfire activity in the western U.S. has increased in size, severity, and frequency, causing growing impacts on human health and safety, air pollution, water quality, and other services. Fire performs natural functions in fire-adapted landscapes, but modern-era fire suppression has limited fire’s function in natural ecosystems and resulted in fuel accumulation in forests and altered fire regimes. Quantification of historical fire regimes and fire effects put contemporary fires into historical context and inform policy decision-making aimed at adapting social and ecological systems towards resilience to fire. This session solicits reports from temperate forest or Mediterranean ecosystems quantifying historic fire regimes, their drivers and/or their subsequent impacts, especially on air quality, emissions, and ecosystem structure. We solicit contributions from field studies, large-scale burn scar analyses, modeling, and alternative forms of quantification, including ethnographies, which focus on periods before modern-era fire suppression.

• A - Atmospheric Sciences
• GC - Global Environmental Change
• NH - Natural Hazards