Malcolm P. North's research while affiliated with University of California, Davis and other places

... While the way society perceives these fires and their economic impacts on infrastructure and populations are crucial, it is also necessary to accurately evaluate their immediate ecological impacts to provide valuable information to societies and stakeholders. This evaluation could reveal unexplored aspects, potentially challenging the characterization of distinctiveness granted to extreme fire seasons as in 2022 solely based on burned areas, which may overstate or oversimplify wildfire issues "to garner attention in a competitive media ecosystem" (Jones et al., 2022). ...

... According to Turner et al. (1994), stand-replaced patches that were narrow and extended for several kilometers had greater regeneration due to adjacent seed sources in unburned or low-severity burned patches compared to larger patches with more area beyond the seed dispersal distance of source stands. The analysis of spatial vegetation patterns and their relationships with fire as a critical ecological process is important for setting management priorities and designing forest restoration treatments at the landscape level that increase resilience to fire (Dickinson et al., 2016;Fertel et al., 2022;Larson & Churchill, 2012). ...

... Acidobacteriota had a significant negative correlation with soil moisture, NO 3 − -N, SOC, and NH 4 + -N. Acidobacteriota plays a significant role in the decomposition of organic matter and nutrient cycling [29]. ...

... For centuries, fire has played a key role in shaping the structure and composition of the yellow pine and mixed-conifer (YPMC) forests of California's Sierra Nevada (North et al., 2016;Safford and Stevens 2017). Prior to Euro-American colonization, lightning ignitions and Indigenous burning practices maintained a frequent (<20-year fire return interval), low-intensity fire regime, supporting mostly low-density forest structures and dominance of large fire-tolerant trees Taylor et al., 2016;Safford and Stevens 2017;North et al., 2022). Historical YPMC forests represented an archetypical example of ecosystem resilience by maintaining a stable range of structure and composition through centuries of repeat fires, climatic variability, and other disturbances (Walker et al., 2004;Hessburg et al., 2019;Ziegler et al., 2021). ...

... Intersecting or stacked logs (sensu Lutz et al. 2021;their Figure 8) can spread fire, potentially killing vegetation and altering soil characteristics (Monsanto and Agee 2008;Knapp 2015). As tree mortality rates continue to increase in response to drought, bark beetles, and fire (van Mantgem et al. 2009;Allen et al. 2010), snags will become more abundant, and understanding post-fire snag dynamics will become more central to managing habitat and modeling fuels and fire behavior (Stephens et al. 2018(Stephens et al. , 2022Goodwin et al. 2021). ...

... Much of the information about individual species can be found in Burns and Honkala (1990) Prior to fire exclusion, fire return intervals in lower elevation montane forests of the Klamath Mountains averaged~15 years and ranged from~5 to 75 years (Taylor & Skinner, 1998;Taylor & Skinner, 2003). Both the mean and range of fire frequency increased with elevation in upper-montane and subalpine forests, with a mean of 43 years and fire-free periods ranged 6 to 126 years (Coppoletta et al., 2021). During the 20th and 21st centuries, active fire exclusion led to predictable increases in fuel accumulation and shade-tolerant tree species (Dimario et al., 2018;Skinner et al., 2006;Taylor & Skinner, 1998. ...

... Fire suppressed forests with edaphic or other disturbance-driven heterogeneity may exhibit improved resilience to future disturbances and climate change due to their structural variability (Hessburg et al., 2019). In these sites, perhaps only minimal restoration treatments or the use of unplanned ignitions to support resource objectives (i.e., wildland fire use) will be required to improve resilience (Weatherspoon and Skinner, 1995;North et al., 2021;Ziegler et al., 2021). ...

... These results highlight the importance of incorporating hyperspectral information in current ESMs. Doing so in the coming years will also enable direct assimilation of in-situ and satellite observations of hyperspectral surface reflectance , linking intrinsic surface properties with processes, such as leaf pigments (Féret et al., 2019), vegetation and soils chemical composition (Meacham-Hensold et al., 2019;Serbin et al., 2014), as well as rhizospheric processes (Braghiere et al., 2021b;Sousa et al., 2021). Figure 4 includes variables that were evaluated over both land and ocean, such as net solar flux at TOA (W m −2 ) and vertically integrated total cloud (%), which may be influenced over the ocean through changes in land-sea temperature contrasts or circulation patterns. ...

... Additionally, despite the dominance of intermediate and open ICO structure classes, we note that reference sites on average were composed of 9.9% of the closed canopy structure class which was characterized by large TAO clumps and <10% area gap. These patches of denser canopy structures in reference sites, likely concentrated in valleys and areas with higher productivity Jeronimo et al., 2019;Ng et al., 2020), contribute to other important ecosystem services like wildlife habitat and biodiversity (Meyer et al., 2007a;Stephens et al., 2016b;Kramer et al., 2021;Stephens et al., 2021;Steel et al., 2022). ...

... At our study area, Pinus flexilis dominates a mixed conifer stand at an elevation of 2810 m asl, in the montane belt of the Snake Range, while P. longaeva is dominant near treeline (3355 m asl), in the subalpine zone. Recent research in the Great Basin found that while the upper limits for both species have shifted upward since 1950, P. flexilis is using its broader range of tolerance during early-life stages to leap-frog over P. longaeva and regenerate at high elevations (Millar et al., 2015;Smithers et al., 2021;Smithers et al., 2018). Other conifer species, Abies concolor (Gordon & Glend.) ...