When asked to picture a wildfire, most people imagine a forest—trees burning, smoke billowing, and flames casting shadows. Images of wildfire are becoming more familiar as large fires make headlines across the US. But the effects of fire extend beyond forests. Streams and rivers flowing through burned areas are also impacted by wildfire and can carry those impacts to downstream communities and ecosystems. Of particular interest within the Pacific Northwest, is the effect of wildfire on the region’s iconic salmon species. While these fish evolved with fire, the combination of degraded habitat and changing wildfire patterns can make them vulnerable to wildfire impacts.

It is important to note that fire isn’t necessarily bad for salmon. On the contrary, it can be a key mechanism for habitat creation. Dead trees left behind by wildfires fall into streams, capturing sediment and creating cool pools that salmon love. Landslides carry gravel into stream channels which distribute it, creating the texture necessary for salmon spawning. It is only when natural fire cycles, river systems, or salmon populations are degraded that wildfire can become a negative influence on salmon survival. In this way, healthy fire regimes, healthy rivers, and healthy salmon are interrelated. To understand how wildfire impacts salmon, a group of researchers and resource managers, funded by the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP), came together to understand the ecological and social conditions that shape salmon responses to wildfire.

To understand the relationship between wildfire and salmon, it is important to understand their history. In the centuries since initial contact and colonization of the Pacific Northwest land management and colonial practices have altered the region’s forests. Euro-American settlement, the exclusion of indigenous burning, resource exploitation, and climate variation have altered the vegetation and fire regimes of Washington’s forests (Hessburg & Agee, 2003). With the coming of Euro-American settlers, an era of resource extraction began. Clear cutting and plantation forestry homogenized forests and increased the dominance of shade tolerant species. Decades of active fire suppression led to fuel accumulation and infilling by fire-intolerant trees creating live fuel ladders (Hessburg et al., 2022). These legacies are exacerbated today by the increasing frequency of fire weather. As human-caused climate change continues to raise temperatures and shift weather patterns, these conditions are projected to become increasingly common, compounding existing risk posed by unhealthy forests (Abatzoglou et al., 2019; Halofsky et al., 2020).

As logging and fire suppression shifted fire regimes across the country, a parallel process of disruption occurred in river systems. The popularity of beaver pelts lead beaver to be hunted to near extinction, robbing riparian and aquatic ecosystems of a keystone species. Gold and silver rushes lead to the dredging of streams in search of the precious metals and to rapid population growth accompanied by increased agriculture. Continued urbanization throughout the 20th century brought roads, railroads, and dams which altered river valleys and flows and disconnected rivers from their floodplains (Peipoch et al., 2015). The scale of these alterations jeopardized the habitat of many aquatic species including salmon, limiting habitat quality young fish threatening their ability to adequately develop before their migration to sea (Crozier & Siegel, 2023). As a result of degraded habitat and other climate related pressures, many salmon populations are struggling. In Washington, fourteen populations of salmonids are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

In the same way that river systems, salmon populations, and wildfire patterns have all been shaped by people over the past centuries, the future of these systems depends on our decisions. In Washington, the state has invested substantial funds in wildfire risk reduction and in salmon habitat restoration. Despite the robust systems managing these two spaces, overlaps in their work are infrequent. To understand how managers are thinking about the added pressure of wildfire on salmon populations, I designed an interview-based study in collaboration with the SNAPP team. In narrowing in on research questions and crafting my interview protocol, I ran multiple workshops with the SNAPP team. Working with this team gave me the opportunity to get repeated feedback from managers actively thinking about wildfire and salmonid health and to ground my research in practical challenges.

Supported by the Climate Solutions Fund, I spent the summer of 2025 interviewing resource managers in the fire-prone forests of Central and Eastern Washington. I wanted to know how they were building wildfire resilience for river systems and what challenges they were meeting along the way. My interviews spanned the length of the state, from White Salmon to Winthrop. I spoke with hydrologists, fish biologists, prescribed fire practitioners, and forest planners. For these managers, fire was both professional and personal. While they thought about fire in their capacity as resource managers, many of them also lived in communities with high wildfire risk. Some described past experiences being evacuated from their homes due to fires or having to help friends who had lost property. As I conducted my interviews, two large wildfires broke out within my study area—the Lower Sugarloaf Fire, close to Lake Entiat, and the Labor Mountain Fire, between Cle Elum and Wenatchee. In a memorable instance, a hill above Winthrop caught fire four hours before one of my interviews, blanketing the Methow Valley in a cloud of smoke thick enough to scratch my throat and threatening homes nearby. This is all to say, that wildfire in the region is a constant presence for both private citizens and resource managers. Growing concern and public support have built momentum for proactive wildfire preparedness and is shaping the dialogue around the future of resource management in the region.

While some of the challenges resource managers faced when planning for wildfire were location specific, shared trends emerged across the state. Some of these challenges were unsurprising and common to many resource management issues. Limited funding, for example, constrains the scope of work that can be completed. Strict regulations require time consuming permitting processes which slow projects and add administrative burden to already overtaxed staff. Patchwork patterns of land ownership complicate landscape scale planning. But these interviews also highlighted a fissure in the resource management landscape.

The management of forested and river systems tends to proceed in parallel by separate processes. Each of these spheres is subject to different regulations, operates under different management plans with differing measures of success, and pulls from different funding sources. When it comes to wildfire planning, this separation can make coordinating efforts across disciplinary divides difficult. Despite widespread agreement in the resource management community that more cross disciplinary work would be beneficial, logistical challenges created by current management and funding structures make these projects uncommon.

“How we’ve siloed our work divisions, […] we tend to think about ecosystems as these segments instead of as a connected whole. It’s something that really puts silos in our work that don’t necessarily need to be there.” – F_ST_05

Take funding for example. Grants are often targeted toward specific types of projects. In Washington, much of the state salmon funding comes from dam operators, who are required to fund habitat restoration to mitigate the negative impacts of dams on salmon. These projects tend to be narrowly focused on in-stream work with measurable and proven outcomes. While pursuing projects with known outcomes is beneficial, it can also limit creativity and narrow the focus of restoration work. Currently, few funding sources are available for management projects that connect in-stream and upland work.

Likewise, mandates from within an organization can force focus on certain outcomes. For example, timber targets within the forest service mean that success is measured based on trees cut rather than on restoration-based metrics. Executive orders from the White House have only increased this pressure, and many working in river restoration worry that these mandates will pull funding from their projects.

Another piece of the problem is knowledge. Resource managers focusing on forest and fire management often expressed that, while they believed their work impacted streams, they didn’t know what those impacts looked like. Managers along both sides of the divide were interested in better understanding the connections between forest and river management.

“I wish foresters understood the connections. I think they do in theory. I just think foresters tend to work in the uplands and fisheries biologists work in the streams. I would love it if there was more cross collaboration there. I just feel like it’s pretty disconnected.” – F_NGO_02

So, what do we do with these challenges? Literature suggests that individuals or groups that span disciplinary boundaries—known as boundary entities—can ease these divides (Olsson et al., 2007). They can take on logistical burdens to facilitate project coordination or act as conduits of information between forest, fire, and river managers. Increasing the flexibility of funding sources could also create pathways for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Funding sources specifically targeted towards cross-disciplinary approaches could incentivize collaboration. Lastly, shifting management goals and metrics of success to target ecological processes that benefit forests and streams alike could eases tension and facilitate cooperation.

In April 2026, I attended the After the Flames Conference in Cle Elum, where I shared preliminary findings from my research with resource managers engaged in wildfire recovery work. I plan to share my research again at the International Association for Society and Natural Resources (IASNR) conference in June, with funding support from the Climate Solutions Fund. To ensure my findings are shared with interviewees, I am currently writing fact sheets to distribute to my study participants and to partner organizations throughout the region.

While the many structures reinforcing the siloed management of forests and streams pose significant challenges, momentum is building towards a more coordinated approach. To move from discussion to reality, explicit recognition of and dialogue around the barriers to collaboration is an important step. Wildfire will continue to be a threat throughout the Pacific Northwest until we are able to restore it to its natural patterns. Proactive and cooperative planning at the watershed scale offers a path forward for the protection of forests and salmon alike.

“Having healthier forest ecosystems should contribute to our salmon recovery goals. Implementing the uplands work and the riparian restoration concurrently is going to create the conditions to give salmon the best chance.” – F_ST_02

By Sydney Sappenfield, PCC Climate Solutions Awardee, M.S. Student, University of Washington, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences