2020 Fire Return Interval Departure for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks

This dataset is essential to identifying high priority areas most in need of burn treatment to optimize the use of limited funding. This ecological model considered fire rotations based on historic fire return intervals within general plant communities. The longer a time interval exceeded the maximum historic fire interval without a fire, the higher the priority rating for returning fire to this area. All of the parks vegetation classes were rated based on fire return interval departures. This rating permitted us to assign priorities based on ranks for all areas in our model. The historic fire regime return interval values were based primarily on reconstructed fire history chronologies derived from tree-ring samples obtained from fire-scarred trees in the vicinity of SEKI, or from the literature if the information for a vegetation type did not exist from within or near the park. To provide a conservative estimate, we used the maximum average return interval for each vegetation class. The time since last fire was derived from historic fire records or based on the last widespread fire date recorded by the fire history reconstructions. A derived index was calculated to quantify the departure of the vegetation type from its pre-Euroamerican settlement fire return interval. The departure index ranged from -1 to 20 with 20 being the most extreme deviation from historic fire regimes.