This special issue contains seven papers on long-term fire history, climate, and land use effects on fire regimes in several new geographic locales and ecosystems in California, USA. It covers fire history on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, and fire scarred trees to reconstruct detailed...

Bigcone Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa [Vasey] Mayr) is a long-lived, fire-adapted conifer that is endemic to the Transverse Ranges of southern California. At the lower and middle reaches of its elevational distribution, isolated stands of bigcone Douglas-fir are surrounded by extensive stands ...

Every year, millions of hectares burn across Siberia, driven by a combination of warming temperatures, regional drought and human-caused ignitions. Dendrochronology provides a long-term context to evaluate recent trends in fire activity and interpret the relative influence of humans and climate...

Giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum [Lindl.] J. Buchholz) preserve a detailed history of fire within their annual rings. We developed a 3000 year chronology of fire events in one of the largest extant groves of ancient giant sequoias, the Giant Forest, by sampling and tree-ring dating fire...

The influence of tree age on climate sensitivity is of central importance in dendrochronology. Recent research has highlighted the disparate nature of age-dependent growth responses across species and geographic locations. We compared growth sensitivity and the influence of climate in Pinus edulis...

Native American populations declined between 1492 and 1900 CE, instigated by the European colonization of the Americas. However, the magnitude, tempo, and ecological effects of this depopulation remain the source of enduring debates. Recently, scholars have linked indigenous demographic decline,...

Fire is an ecologically significant process in the fire-prone ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests of the northern Sierra Nevada. Fire regimes are influenced by processes that operate over a range of scales that can be grouped broadly as bottom-up (e.g., topography, forest type) or top-down...

The spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) is known for extensive outbreaks resulting in high spruce mortality, but several recent outbreaks in the western United States have been among the largest and most severe in the documentary record. In the Pinaleño Mountains of southeast Arizona, U.S.A.,...

Fire is returning to many conifer-dominated forests where species composition and structure have been altered by fire exclusion. Ecological effects of these fires are influenced strongly by the degree of forest change during the fire-free period. Response of fire-adapted species assemblages to...

Fire history reconstructions from fire scars in tree rings have been valuable for assessing fire regime changes and their climatic controls. It has been asserted, however, that these two- to four-century long records from the western USA are unrepresentative of longer periods of the Holocene and...