Increased wildfire activity and altered post-fire climate in the Southern Rocky Mountains has the potential to influence forest resilience. The Southern Rocky Mountains are a leading edge of climate change and have experienced record-breaking fires in recent years. The change in post-fire regeneration and forest resilience could potentially include future ecological trajectories. In this paper, we examined patterns of post-fire spectral recovery using Landsat time series. Additionally, we utilized random forest models to analyze the impact of climate and burn severity on three fire events in the Southern Rocky Mountains. Fifteen years following the fires, none of the burned stands fully recovered to their pre-fire spectral states. The results suggested that burn severity significantly impacted post-fire spectral recovery, but that influence may decrease as time since fire increases. The biggest difference in forest recovery was among fire events, indicating that post-fire climate may be influential in post-fire recovery. The mean and minimum growing-season temperatures were more significant to post-fire recovery than the variability in precipitation, which is consistent with field-based analysis. The present study indicated that, as warming continues, there may be changes in forest density where forests are not regenerating to their pre-fire spectral states. Additionally, this study emphasizes how high-elevation forests continue to regenerate after fires, but that regeneration is markedly affected by post-fire climate.

Disturbances have shaped most terrestrial ecosystems for millennia and are natural and essential components of ecological systems. However, direct and indirect human activities during the Anthropocene have amplified disturbances globally. This amplification, coupled with increasingly unfavorable post-disturbance climatic conditions or ecosystem management that intensifies the initial disturbance, is compromising the resilience of some ecosystems, with cascading effects on Earth system function and ecosystem services. Such dynamics are especially prevalent in forests, which are one of the most important ecosystems on Earth and provide countless ecosystem services for people and nonhuman species. Although climate change and its effects are ubiquitous, they do vary spatially in their intensity, and many ecological systems are more affected by changing land use than by changing climate. Understanding the geographic variation in relationships and feedbacks among climate, vegetation, disturbances, regeneration, and human activity is necessary for developing management strategies that will promote forest resilience (i.e., facilitate ecosystems tolerating and recovering from novel or intensified perturbations without shifting to alternative states controlled by different processes). Successful management strategies will vary geographically depending on the degree of departure from the ecological dynamics that preceded the Anthropocene and the spatial variability in drivers of change. As global environmental change accelerates, conservation areas, and the species and ecosystem services that rely on them, are particularly vulnerable. Where disturbances increase, expanding the size of protected areas and minimizing secondary anthropogenic disturbances are likely to be the only ways to maintain the minimum dynamic area that will cultivate adequate resilience.