The Importance of Tree Size on Fire-Induced Injuries

Wildfire is an important natural disturbance that maintains the health and diversity of many forests across the world. Fire suppression and severe droughts due to climate change have contributed to more frequent and intense fires. Our understanding of how trees respond to fires is very limited but is extremely necessary and urgent for predicting the effects of wildfire in response to climate change. Here, we assess the effects of different fire behavior different sizes of tree species. We link a computational fluid dynamics model for fire spread (the NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator) with a two-dimensional stem heat transfer model (FireStem2D) to characterize general scaling relationships between fire behavior, tree size, and functional traits. Our results show how fire effects scale with key fire behavior, plant size, and functional traits variables, and that all must be considered to better understand the response of plants to fire and to development models to predict post-fire tree mortality.