Recent mountain pine beetle outbreaks, wildfire severity, and postfire tree regeneration in the US Northern Rockies

Understanding how multiple disturbances may interact to affect ecosystems is important for ecosystem management as climate-driven disturbance activity increases. Recent severe bark beetle (Circulionidae: Scolytinae) outbreaks have led to widespread concern about the potential for increased wildfire severity and decreased postfire forest resilience throughout the northern hemisphere. Using extensive field data collected in multiple recent (occurring in 2011) wildfires throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains (United States), we found that recent (2001-2010) prefire mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreak severity affected few measures of wildfire severity and was not directly related to postfire tree seedling establishment, suggesting that subalpine forests dominated by serotinous lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) may be resilient to these two combined disturbances.