2020 Woodward Fire case study: Examining the role of fire as an ecological process in a coastal California ecosystem

Early observations indicate that the Woodward Fire may yield net positive ecological effects across the burn area beyond just reduction of surface fuels, such as increased heterogeneity across the landscape, shifts in vegetation types, and possible appearance of rare fire-following species. In California, the 2020 fire season doubled previous records in terms of acreage (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection 2020), creating 111.7 million metric tons of carbon emissions (preliminary estimate from California Air Resources Board, 2020). Suppression costs alone were over $1 billion, and this figure does not capture the immeasurable damages to affected communities and ecosystems (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection 2020; National Interagency Fire Center 2020). Due to highly varied topography, geology, and hydrology, as well as disturbance history, the pattern of these different vegetation communities across the landscape is a mosaic of habitat types with high levels of heterogeneity over short distances and at small spatial scales (Steers et al. 2008; Wrubel and Parker 2018).