Modeled interactions of mountain pine beetle and wildland fire under future climate and management scenarios for three western US landscapes

Abstract Background Mountain pine beetle (MPB) is a native disturbance agent across most forests in the western US. Climate changes will directly and indirectly impact frequencies severities of MPB outbreaks, which can then alter fuel characteristics wildland fire dynamics via stand structure composition. To investigate importance to past future landscape dynamics, we used mechanistic, spatially explicit ecosystem process model FireBGCv2 quantify interactions among climate, MPB, wildfire, suppression, management under historical projected climates for three US landscapes. We compared simulated output from modules (none, simple empirical, complex mechanistic) using focus variables six exploratory evaluate dynamics. Results found that inclusion (empirical or simulations significantly changed mechanistic module had more cross-scale increased variability, perhaps realism, simulation results. also evaluated impacts on suppression influenced loadings than disturbance, but at scale, treatment programs did little change loadings, burned area, except high suppression. Conclusions Synergistic wildfire catalyzed landscape-scale vegetation distributions, fuels, regimes simulations. Models simulate climate pine-dominated landscapes may be improved by including account potentially important ecological interactions.