Colorado’s record-setting 2020 fire season exemplified a decades-long trend of increasing fire activity across the West, well-correlated with climate change and increasingly paired with devastating human impacts. In this presentation, Higuera helps make sense of such extreme events by drawing on the long-term perspective gained from paleoecological records of climate, fire, and forest history in Colorado subalpine forests spanning the past 6000 years. Paired with contemporary observations and fire ecology, we will learn what aspects of ongoing change in subalpine forests are “business as usual,” what aspects are unprecedented, and what we can anticipate as forests continue to adjust to a rapidly warming world.
