Local-scale and regional climate controls on historical fire regimes in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado

Abstract In ponderosa pine and mixed conifer ecosystems of the Southwestern US, regional-scale climate tends to synchronize fire years among study sites and increase fire extent or severity within a forest. At landscape scales (1–100 km 2 ), fire frequency and severity may also be influenced by local-scale differences in elevation and aspect, including fire barriers in rugged terrain. This study examines local-scale and regional controls of past fire regimes in three tributary watersheds of the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. In each watershed, we sampled fire-scarred trees and tree age structure and identified fire years and cohorts of post-fire tree recruitment. Fire frequency varied by aspect, and we observed the largest differences between the north- and south-facing aspects in the two largest basins. Fire severity was also different by aspect, with low-severity fire regimes on south-facing slopes and mixed-severity fire on north-facing slopes. The majority of fire years were unique, single-basin fires, indicating a lack of synchrony of fire years among basins, which we attributed to fire barriers and rugged terrain. We conducted Superposed Epoch Analysis (SEA) on two groups of fire years, to show average climate conditions before and during fire years. The first group were unique single-basin fires ( n  = 27) and the second group included all years when synchronous fire burned in two or three basins ( n  = 15). Both groups had significantly dry Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) values during the fire year ( p p