Fast-moving fires can scorch forests. They may never grow back, research finds

Shanna Lewis/KRCC Trees burned in the Aspen Acres wildfire, near Beulah. Aug. 9, 2026.

Article via Colorado Public Radio written by Ishan Thakore

Fast-moving wildfires have ripped through millions of acres of North American forests in the last decade. New research shows that those fires change landscapes so severely that forests may never grow back.

Researchers at Western Colorado University, Colorado State University, the Forest Service and other institutions analyzed reams of satellite data from around 3,500 wildfires in Canada and the United States between 2012 to 2023.

The study examined more than 33,000 days of activity across those fires. Researchers looked at a fire’s speed through a forest on those days, its eventual growth and what the area looked like afterward.

Faster indicates more severe

What they found, according to lead author and WCU professor Jonathan Coop, was that fast fires can balloon in size and decimate a forest in the process.

“Not only do these really fast-moving explosive fires burn more area, but that they burn that area more severely,” Coop said.

The fastest days for fire growth burned a significant amount of forest at an extremely high “burn severity,” which measures how the ecology or landscape changed afterward.

New ecosystems

How intensely a fire burns can hinder a forest’s recovery. The fastest, most destructive fires can create huge, gaping holes in forests. Those patches can be far away from any remaining trees, who are then unable to reseed the landscape.

That opens the door for completely new ecosystems to sprout up instead — like shifts from one forest type to another, or even to shrubs or grassland.

The study examined relatively recent fires, so there still may be a chance that those forests eventually recover. But indicators and evidence from Colorado fires suggest that may be difficult.

Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite Burned trees left from the 2020 Cameron Peak fire in Larimer County. Oct. 24, 2021.

In 2020, the Cameron Peak fire consumed hundreds of thousands of acres in Northern Colorado, and is the state’s largest fire by acreage. Today, there’s limited evidence that the forest is recovering, said Coop.

He also said that parts of the 2002 Hayman fire burn area show “zero potential” for a ponderosa pine forest to spring back up.

“When we go into some of these slightly older burns, it really looks like there’s really no future for forests here,” he said. “There hasn’t been any recovery in 20, 25 years.”

Adapting landscapes

Losing a forest can negatively impact humans, who lose recreation, watershed health and can see a spike in carbon emissions. But a change to grasslands could also mean the land is becoming better adapted to a climate-changed future.

Climate change is creating hotter, drier conditions across the American West and Canada.

Dealing with those fires is increasingly challenging, Coop said. Conducting prescribed burns and thinning can help reduce the severity of fires, but they may not blunt megafires.

“There are lots of forest management activities that we all would like to believe will save us,” he said. “But when we get these kinds of fires burning under these kinds of conditions, there’s not much we can do at a scale that matters.”

Actually reducing fire growth and severity will likely require the tough task of addressing climate change.

“[These fires] have the fingerprints of climate change all over them,” he said. “It’s hot and dry and smoky, but these problems are only going to get worse until we deal with the underlying cause.”

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