Perspectives: The pace and scale challenge: Leveraging wildfire footprints to increase forest resilience to future high-severity fire

In historically frequent fire forests, wildfires are burning larger areas and driving forest loss across western North America, yet they also produce extensive low- to moderate-severity effects that can be leveraged to harden landscapes against future high-severity fire. Here, we operationalize prior conceptual calls by presenting a framework that identifies opportunities to leverage recent wildfire footprints via three management pathways to increasing resistance to high-severity fire: create (use burned edges as containment lines to treat adjacent unburned forest), enhance (apply mechanical treatment and prescribed fire or wildfire managed for resource objectives to areas with one prior beneficial disturbance), and maintain (sustain high-resistance stands with recurring fire). We quantify the extent of these opportunities across California’s Sierra Nevada yellow pine-mixed conifer forests at the Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) scale and outline policy options to act within limited post-fire windows. This work can support increasing resistance to high-severity fire across the landscape, highlighting how leveraging wildfire has the potential to save time and money, lower operational risk under suitable conditions, and promote pyrodiversity and biodiversity. • Management in and around wildfire footprints could increase treatment pace and scale. • Burned edges could be used as containment lines to treat adjacent unburned forest. • Managers could enhance the resistance of forests burned at low to moderate severity. • We map and quantify the opportunity to leverage recent wildfires in a case study.