Hotter-burning wildfires are transforming California’s forests, and not for the better. A new study from UC Davis finds high-intensity fires leave fewer trees and a less diverse population of plants behind.

“We're finding that high intensity, really dangerous fires ... are becoming more frequent,” said Clark Richter, a graduate student in ecology at UC Davis. “They're burning a larger area than was typical historically.”

Richter and a team sampled plants across patches of land in the Sierra Nevada that were burned in at least eight fires over the last 20 years. Their goal was to get a better picture of what happened to plants in the forest understory.

Richter calls the current pattern of fire in California, one where fires burn intensely hot, “novel.” He and a research team saw that “when fire climbs up into the canopy, it often kills the adult trees,” he said. “And that causes a dramatic change to the system.”

Those intense fires transform forest into shrubland. And according to Richter, the more frequent and the larger the area burned at these high-severity sites, the larger the shrub fields left behind.

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