Evaluating the long-term effects of near-natural restoration on post-fire forest dynamics in a wildland-urban interface landscape

Forests in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are of high value but vulnerable to wildland fires due to abundant fire ignitions and flammable forest fuels. Restoring the post-fire Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) forest landscape is of utmost importance in order to maintain ecosystem service provision. The near-natural restoration strategy is widely employed in vegetation restoration as it enables the formation of healthy, stable, and diverse artificial mixed forests that resemble natural forests. To evaluate the long-term effects of near-natural restoration on the WUI forest landscape, which are largely unclear, we used a wildfire in 2019 near Shenyang City in northeast China as an example and investigated the post-fire forest dynamics under two different scenarios (i.e., natural succession and near-natural restoration) based on the forest landscape model. The results demonstrated that near-natural restoration can significantly accelerate the restoration process in terms of forest biomass, species biodiversity, and age structure. Under the near-natural restoration scenario, the biomass of the burned area can be quickly restored within 20 years after the fire. At the species level, the biomass and proportion of pioneer tree species such as Pinus tabuliformis and Robinia pseudoacacia decreased under the near-natural restoration scenario, while other species started to increase. Then post-fire near-natural planting accelerated the restoration of forest biodiversity, by 2070, the Shannon–Wiener index was predicted to be 1.49 under natural succession and remained at 2.02 under near-natural restoration. In terms of age structure, near-natural restoration shortens the recovery time of fire trails to mature forests. In summary, near-natural restoration accelerates forest recovery in post-fire WUI areas. Our results highlighted the impact of near-natural restoration on forest conservation to inform post-fire forest planning and management practices.