Jonathan C. B. Nesmith MaryBeth Keifer Matthew Brooks Philip J. van Mantgem 2012 The reintroduction of fire to historically fire-prone forests has been repeatedly shown to reduce understory fuels and promote resistance to high severity fire. However, there is concern that prescribed fire may also have unintended consequences, such as high rates of mortality for large trees and fire-tolerant <i>Pinus</i> species. To test this possibility we evaluated mortality patterns for two common genera in the western US, <i>Pinus</i> and <i>Abies</i>, using observations from a national-scale prescribed fire effects monitoring program. Our results show that mortality rates of trees >50 DBH were similar for <i>Pinus</i> (4.6% yr^-1) and Abies (4.0% yr^-1) 5 years following prescribed fires across seven sites in the southwestern US. In contrast, mortality rates of trees >50 cm DBH differed between <i>Pinus</i> (5.7% yr^-1) and <i>Abies</i> (9.0% yr^-1). Models of post-fire mortality probabilities suggested statistically significant differences between the genera (after including differences in bark thickness), but accounting for these differences resulted in only small improvements in model classification. Our results do not suggest unusually high post-fire mortality for large trees or for <i>Pinus</i> relative to the other common co-occurring genus, <i>Abies</i>, following prescribed fire in the southwestern US. application/pdf 10.1016/j.foreco.2012.09.029 en Elsevier Tree mortality patterns following prescribed fire for <i>Pinus</i> and <i>Abies</i> across the southwestern United States article