---
title: "Fire-Adapted Forests Across the U.S. Are Failing to Regrow After Hotter Wildfires"
description: "In Yellowstone, only about 5% of tree seedlings have returned since a 2016 fire, part of a broader shift from forest to scrubland"
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-10-04T16:00:45.795Z
modified: 2026-10-05T10:15:10Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/fire-adapted-forests-across-the-u-s-are-failing-to-regrow-af-47f291
language: en
tags: ["climate", "wildfire", "ecology", "biodiversity", "environment", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Fire-Adapted Forests Across the U.S. Are Failing to Regrow After Hotter Wildfires

*In Yellowstone, only about 5% of tree seedlings have returned since a 2016 fire, part of a broader shift from forest to scrubland*

By rews desk · October 4, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/fire-adapted-forests-across-the-u-s-are-failing-to-regrow-af-47f291

## In brief

- Only about 5% of tree seedlings have returned since Yellowstone’s 2016 Maple Fire, ecologist Monica Turner found
- Researchers across the U.S. say fire-adapted forests increasingly fail to survive hotter, faster wildfires
- Scientists blame a century of fire suppression and the decline of prescribed burning long used by Indigenous people
- In California’s, fast-resprouting shrubs have taken over land burned in the 2021 Dixie Fire
- New Mexico’s Sugarite Canyon saw locust, oak, dandelions and herbs return after the Track Fire in place of firs

When Monica Turner hiked the western hills of Yellowstone National Park in 2013, she fought through dense forest in a cold rain. Coming back four years later after the Maple Fire of 2016, she found a bare, sun-beaten clearing with a scattering of surviving trees and thin, pencil-like sticks rising from charred ground, she told CNN.

Dr. Turner, the Eugene P. Odum Professor of Ecology and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent years studying how the park recovered from its enormous 1988 fires. For a long time, she said, she took that recovery back, and with a high density of trees. She did not appreciate, she said, “how much things could change in a relatively short time.”

The heat on the 2017 trip was so severe that a field assistant was hospitalized for dehydration, she said. And the burn was total in places.

“We could see what we call ghost logs, which is where there had been large logs on the ground, and they were completely combusted,” she said. “And then you can see their shadows where the white ash is left behind from the hot temperatures.”

Only about 5 percent of the tree seedlings have grown back so far, compared with what burned. In their place, grasses and post-fire wildflowers fill the open meadow. Dr. Turner described “a slow but detectable shift” toward plants “more tolerant of warmer, drier conditions” that can return more easily if another fire comes.

Researchers across the United States are seeing the same pattern: forests that evolved with fire are increasingly being destroyed outright by the fast, high-temperature blazes that are becoming more common as the climate warms. None of the scientists CNN interviewed saw fire itself as the problem. Every one emphasized that the land needs fire — and that the decline of prescribed burning, a practice long used by Indigenous people to clear dead growth and keep forests healthy, has left trees exposed to hotter, more vicious fires.

The consequences reach visitors, too. Dr. Turner said the park at one point temporarily banned fishing, including catch and release, because fish were already stressed by low water levels and high water temperatures, partly from the loss of shade. What the future Yellowstone will look like, she said, is not yet clear.

About 100 miles northeast of Sacramento, Derek Young, a research ecologist at the University of California, Davis, stood in a clearing in Plumas National Forest ringed by the remains of burned trees, left by the 2021 Dixie Fire. A field he has studied for 15 years is becoming unrecognizable. “It’s really actually crazy to how much change has happened,” he said.

What is filling in are shrubs — deer brush, white thorn and others that resprout quickly from roots that survive the fire. Within a few years they can stand as tall as a person and cover an area entirely. “It can really feel like you’re swimming in a sea of shrubs. You can’t see more than a few feet ahead of you,” Dr. Young said in an interview with CNN. Trees, needing specific conditions at exactly the right moment, cannot easily compete.

The trade carries a climate cost. “As forests burn up, they release carbon, contribute to climate change, which makes it more likely for more fires to burn and convert more forests,” he said. But the conversion, he noted, is not natural. “It’s not that the system naturally wanted to be shrubs. We created that condition by suppressing fires for 100 years.”

In New Mexico, Chris Guiterman, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University and other herbs and shrubs sprouting where the trees once stood.