Across the Western U.S. and globally, the cascading consequences of high-severity wildfire are becoming more and more concerning for human safety and ecosystem stability. In the temperate rainforests of the Western Cascades, we may see a departure from the historical low-frequency, high-severity wildfire regime, towards more frequent high-severity events. This type of severe wildfire in our headwater catchments directly changes the physical soil properties, which impacts hydrological functions and can lead to catastrophic changes to aquatic habitat and water resources downstream, including increased runoff, erosion and debris flows. Similarly, these changes impact the water available to plants, potentially limiting the regrowth and resilience of forests in post-fire ecosystems. Though many tools exist to assist managers in targeted post-fire treatment and pre-fire planning for erosion, flood and debris flow risk, these models have not been tested for many of the Pacific Northwest temperate forest regions, including the Cascade temperate rainforest zone.

To address this gap, Dylan’s graduate research aims to enhance the current generation of post-fire hydrology decision-support tools to have greater applicability within the seasonal temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest. His research will also produce regional risk maps indicating which headwater catchments across the Northwest will be the most vulnerable to the multi-hazard impacts of wildfire and climate change, particularly for forest and aquatic ecosystems. These maps, along with improved modeling interfaces, will be available for land managers and emergency wildland fire response teams to efficiently identify areas of greatest concern in post-fire landscapes and enable pre-fire risk assessment to better improve our adaptive capacity.