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Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which limits seed availability, and postfire climate, which influences seedling establishment. In the near-term, projected differences in recruitment probability between low- and high-severity fire scenarios were larger than projected climate change impacts for most species, suggesting that reductions in fire severity, and resultant impacts on seed availability, could partially offset expected climate-driven declines in postfire regeneration. Across 40 to 42% of the study area, we project postfire conifer regeneration to be likely following low-severity but not high-severity fire under future climate scenarios (2031 to 2050). However, increasingly warm, dry climate conditions are projected to eventually outweigh the influence of fire severity and seed availability. The percent of the study area considered unlikely to experience conifer regeneration, regardless of fire severity, increased from 5% in 1981 to 2000 to 26 to 31% by mid-century, highlighting a limited time window over which management actions that reduce fire severity may effectively support postfire conifer regeneration.

Community re-assembly following future disturbances will often occur under warmer and more moisture-limited conditions than when current communities assembled. Because the establishment stage is regularly the most sensitive to climate and competition, the trajectory of recovery from disturbance in a changing environment is uncertain, but has important consequences for future ecosystem functioning. To better understand how ongoing warming and rising moisture limitation may affect recovery, we studied native and exotic plant composition 11 years following complete stand-replacing wildfire in a dry coniferous forest spanning a large gradient in climatic moisture deficit (CMD) from warm and dry low elevation sites to relatively cool and moist higher elevations sites. We then projected future precipitation, temperature and CMD at our study locations for four scenarios selected to encompass a broad range of possible future conditions for the region. Native perennials dominated relatively cool and moist sites 11 years after wildfire, but were very sparse at the warmest and driest (high CMD) sites, particularly when combined with high topographic sun exposure. In contrast, exotic species (primarily annual grasses) were dominant or co-dominant at the warmest and driest sites, especially with high topographic sun exposure. All future scenarios projected increasing temperature and CMD in coming decades (e.g., from 4.5% to 29.5% higher CMD by the 2080's compared to the 1971-2000 average), even in scenarios where growing season (May-September) precipitation increased. These results suggest increasing temperatures and moisture limitation could facilitate longer term (over a decade) transitions toward exotic-dominated communities after severe wildfire when a suitable exotic seed source is present., (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)