Contemporary fires are less frequent but more severe in dry conifer forests of the southwestern United States
A fire-scarred southwestern white pine in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. The tree survived and recorded multiple low-severity fires, the last of which burned over 140 years ago in 1880. How do you study forest fire history? After a forest fire, surviving trees will continue to grow new layers of wood to heal fire injuries. As tree rings provide information about the growth history and age of trees, scientists can use tree-ring fire scars to obtain information about the year, season, severity, frequency, size, and fire-climate relationships of fires that occurred centuries to millennia prior to modern records. In this study