Simulating the Potential for Invasive Grass Expansion to Alter Wildfire Behavior in Southern California With WRF‐Fire
Name
JGR Biogeosciences - 2025 - Wang - Simulating the Potential for Invasive Grass Expansion to Alter Wildfire Behavior in.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
7.5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
51c5fa5d817fabd7590f0555b0713de2
Author(s)
Wang, Bowen
Madakumbura, Gavin D
Juliano, Timothy W
Williams, A Park
Date Issued
August 13, 2025
Journal
Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Wang, B., Madakumbura, G. D., Juliano, T. W., & Williams, A. P. (2025). Simulating the potential for invasive grass expansion to alter wildfire behavior in southern California with WRF-fire. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 130, e2024JG008574.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Invasion by non‐native annual grasses poses a serious threat to native vegetation in California,facilitated through interaction with wildfires. Our work is the first attempt to use the coupled fire‐atmospheremodel, WRF‐Fire, to investigate how shifts from native, shrub‐dominated vegetation to invasive grasses couldhave affected a known wildfire event in southern California. We simulate the Mountain Fire, which burned>11,000 ha in July 2013, under idealized fuel conditions representing varying extents of grass invasion.Expanding grass to double its observed coverage causes fire to spread faster due to the lower fuel load in grassesand increased wind speed. Beyond this, further grass expansion reduces the simulated spread rate because lowerheat release partially offsets the positive effects. Our simulations suggest that grass expansion may generallypromote larger faster‐spreading wildfires in southern California, motivating continued efforts to contain andreduce the spread of invasive annual grasses in this region.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JG008574
