Management Regime and Wildfire Outcomes: Burn Severity and Post-Fire Recovery in a Korean National Park and a Pine-Dominated Managed Forest Burned Three Days Apart

Active management making forests more resistant to wildfire and more resilient afterwards is a widely held assumption that is rarely tested against comparable fires. In March 2023, two wildfires ignited three days and 54 km apart under the same synoptic weather in southern Korea, one in a naturally regenerating forest of Jirisan National Park and one in a pine-dominated production forest. Treating the pair as a natural experiment, we compared burn severity and three-year recovery using Sentinel-2 imagery, hourly ERA5-Land weather, the 1:5000 national stand map and a composition-weighted unburned reference. Both fires burned under light mean winds over nearly equal areas (117 and 122 ha), yet high severity covered 0.4% of the park fire and 11.4% of the managed-forest fire. Broadleaved stands burned alike at the two sites. Pine stands burned far more severely in the managed forest (mean differenced Normalised Burn Ratio 0.37) than in the park (0.25), and pine made up 57% of the managed-forest burn, whereas conifers, mostly pine, made up only 14% of the park burn. The park’s steeper and more sun-exposed terrain would, if anything, have favoured more severe fire. The 2025 stand map reclassified 98% of the managed forest’s pine but classified 19% of its broadleaved stands as unstocked, consistent with the post-fire clearing of pine. Three years later, the park had regained at least 80% of its pre-fire levels for all three spectral indices, whereas the managed forest remained below 80% for NBR and NDMI. Broadleaved and mixed stands showed similar spectral recovery at both sites; pine showed slower spectral recovery at both sites, and the managed forest’s lightly burned pine regained about half the share of its loss observed in the park’s pine, which remained classified as stocked forest, although the intervals of the two estimates overlapped. The managed regime was associated with greater burn severity and slower spectral recovery; the latter coincided with its pine-dominated composition and the post-fire reclassification of most pine stands as unstocked.