Culture, as the filter through which people view the world and a key determinant of human behaviour, is central to the practice of natural resource management and conservation. Conservation is intended to moderate the impacts of human cultural modification of the environment, exists as an endeavour because it is culturally valued, and acts largely through policies to encourage or discourage targeted human behaviours. However, culture is not static; as organisms and ecologies evolve, so too does culture exist as a dynamic, interconnected, coevolving element of the social–ecological systems in which management action is situated and implemented. Cultural evolution (CE) offers a valuable theoretical contribution to the scientific understanding of culture, cultural diversity and culture change and has the potential to be harnessed in the applied research and practice of conservation social science. We illustrate the essential principles necessary to grow an applied science of CE for natural resource management and conservation, and identify opportunities for CE to provide valuable information for science-based decision making and help conservation institutions and organizations adapt to the ongoing challenges posed by culture change. This transdisciplinary integration can contribute to improved outcomes across conservation objectives and build more resilient, sustainable social–ecological systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures’.

Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes. Within many designated wilderness areas, this intentional exclusion of fire has clearly altered ecological processes and thus constitutes a fundamental and ubiquitous act of trammeling. Through a framework that recognizes four orders of trammeling, we demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire exclusion on the natural conditions of fire-adapted wilderness ecosystems. In order to untrammel more than a century of fire exclusion, the implementation of active programs of intentional burning may be necessary across some wilderness landscapes. We also suggest greater recognition and accommodation of Indigenous cultural burning, a practice which Tribes used to shape and maintain many fire-adapted landscapes for thousands of years before Euro-American colonization, including landscapes today designated as wilderness. Human-ignited fire may be critical to restoring the natural character of fire-adapted wilderness landscapes and can also support ecocultural restoration efforts sought by Indigenous peoples.

Within governance agencies, academia, and communities alike, there are increasing calls to recognize the value and importance of culture within social-ecological systems and to better implement Indigenous sciences in research, policy, and management. Efforts thus far have raised questions about the best ethical practices to do so. Engaging with plural worldviews and perspectives on their own terms reflects cultural evolutionary processes driving paradigm shifts in 3 fundamental areas of natural resource management: conceptualizations of natural resources and ecosystems, processes of public participation and governance, and relationships with Indigenous Peoples and communities with differing worldviews. We broadly describe evolution toward these paradigm shifts in fish and wildlife management. We then use 3 case studies to illustrate the ongoing cultural evolution of relationships between wildlife management and Indigenous practices within specific historical and social-ecological contexts and reflect on common barriers to appropriately engaging with Indigenous paradigms and lifeways. Our case studies highlight 3 priorities that can assist the field of wildlife management in achieving the changes necessary to bridge incommensurable worldviews: acknowledging and reconciling historical legacies and their continued power dynamics as part of social-ecological systems, establishing governance arrangements that move beyond attempts to extract cultural information from communities to integrate Indigenous Knowledges into dominant management paradigms, and engaging in critical reflexivity and reciprocal, accountable relationship building. Implementing these changes will take time and a commitment to processes that may initially feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar but have potential to be transformative. Ethical and culturally appropriate methods to include plural and multivocal perspectives and worldviews on their own terms are needed to transform wildlife management to achieve more effective and just management outcomes for all. Transforming wildlife management institutions at the cultural level to increase alignment with diverse worldviews can improve relations with Indigenous Peoples and the implementation of Indigenous Knowledges within management. 3 priorities to facilitate this cultural shift are: reconciling historical legacies and power imbalances, moving beyond attempts to integrate Indigenous Knowledges into dominant management paradigms, and building reciprocal, accountable relations with Indigenous Peoples. image

. Forest managers working in dry forest ecosystems must contend with the costs and benefits of fire, and they are seeking forest management strategies that enhance the resilience of forests and landscapes to future disturbances in a changing climate. An interdisciplinary science team worked with resource managers and stakeholders to assess future forest ecosystem dynamics, given potential climatic changes and management strategies, across a 23,000-ha landscape in the Lake Tahoe basin of California and Nevada in support of the Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership. We projected forest growth and fire dynamics using a landscape change model, upon which the science team layered additional modeling to evaluate changes in wildlife habitat, water, and economics. Managers and stakeholders used the findings of this integrated modeling effort to inform the design of a landscape restoration strategy that balanced risks and benefits based on a robust scientific foundation. The results, published in this Special Feature, suggest that a continuation of status quo management would be less effective at protecting and improving desired outcomes than more active and extensive management approaches. In addition, the types of management activity also affected ecosystem outcomes. Results from across the studies in this special feature suggest that thinning and prescribed fire were complementary, although they resulted in somewhat different effects, and that low-severity use of fire had the greatest array and magnitude of ecosystem benefits. A notable exception was carbon storage, which declined with more active management and prescribed fire in particular. We highlight key findings from this Special Feature and summarize key challenges and some lessons learned in our experience of co-producing science. In short, science-management partnerships require cooperation, patience, and skill, but they are effective in increasing the capacity of land managers to navigate in an environment of rapid change and increasing uncertainty.

Mixed tree-species forest management can increase forest resilience by reducing the impacts of disturbances that disproportionately affect a single tree species or closely related groups of tree species. Beyond disturbance-risk reduction, tree-species diversification may foster functional-diversity effects (e.g., complementarity or facilitation) that alter the performance of a given tree species in mixed versus pure stands, potentially benefitting carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat. Tree species-mixture effects have been explored to only a limited degree in western US forests and, particularly, in California. Establishing whether vigor, growth, and mortality of common tree species vary with stand composition would help inform restoration and modeling of these forests under climate change. Using data from USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots from California, we examined how individual-tree vigor, as indicated by live crown ratio (LCR), periodic basal area increment (BAI), and mortality odds varied with functional dissimilarity (FDis). We quantified FDis using an index based on 11 traits related to resource acquisition, competition, environmental tolerances, and fire ecology. We classified major tree species into ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi), incense-cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), true firs (Abies spp.), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), live oaks (Quercus spp.), and deciduous oaks (Quercus spp.) response groups. We tested for the main effects of FDis on tree responses, as well as for interactions with tree, site, stand, and climate factors. We found that initial tree height modulated the effects of FDis on ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, incense-cedar, and true fir LCR, whereas FDis interacted with climate to alter live oak and deciduous oak LCR. FDis decreased BAI in ponderosa pine and increased BAI in live oaks. FDis interacted with tree size to influence BAI for Jeffrey pine, Douglas-fir, and true firs. We found no evidence that climate or site quality modulated FDis effects on BAI for any species group. Tree mortality was not responsive to FDis, except for the true firs, where both initial tree height and competition interacted with FDis to increase and decrease mortality odds, respectively. FDis effects commonly shifted from positive to negative along gradients of stand structure and site quality, indicating that these effects vary with site and stand conditions. Our results have implications for balancing the ecosystem benefits of mixed stands, such as disturbance risk, carbon sequestration, and habitat during forest restoration projects in the region, as well as for more accurate modeling of complex stands.

Hardwoods resprouting after wildfire or cutting develop as multistemmed clumps that gradually self-thin over time. There is increasing interest in thinning of sprouting species to accelerate the formation of tree characteristics important to indigenous cultural practices and wildlife such as large-diameter stems, large branches, broad crowns, and acorn production. We compared responses to three thinning treatments applied to black oak (Quercus kelloggii) resprouting after high-severity wildfire throughout northern California, USA. Basal area increment of the dominant stem was greatest after only one stem was retained, intermediate after three stems were retained, and lowest within unthinned oaks. Unwanted resprouting in response to the thinning was minimized by retaining three stems. Acorn production tended to increase as time elapsed since the fire (i.e., larger, older sprouts) but varied among sites and was noted as early as six years after fire at one site. More study is needed to test for the effects of thinning timing and intensity on the acceleration of acorn production as well as stem, branch, and crown size development over time.

The growing size and frequency of wildfires in the Western US has pressed a sense of urgency on the Forest Service, other land management agencies and many municipalities on developing fuel management and post-fire mitigation plans. With fuel management practices there is a risk that the management process itself (e.g. thinning and prescribed fire) might lead to more long term erosion compared to doing nothing and gambling that the forest will not be burned by a wildfire. After a wildfire occurs, managers must balance the risk of post-fire erosion with the expense required to protect the soil from an extreme event with an agricultural or wood-based mulch. In the Tahoe basin, we have been using a site-specific, process-based erosion model, WEPPcloud, to identify landscape positions that are most susceptible to erosion by thinning operations or under post-fire wildfire conditions. The WEPPcloud model was used to evaluate the probability of erosion under current undisturbed conditions, various timber harvesting scenarios, prescribed fire, and post-wildfire conditions. The distribution of soil burn severity for future wildfires was simulated using a trained geostatistical approach based on historic regional wildfires. Using WEPPcloud and a newly developed post-processing R shiny app, PI-VAT, which allows prioritization and targeting analysis across multiple watersheds and multiple treatment scenarios, we map the specific hillslopes that are most sensitive to disturbance and provide an optimization approach to guide managers and land use planners in selecting the areas which provide the greatest reduction in sediment load through erosion mitigation activities. Using various statistical analyses, we identify the key soil, vegetative, topographic, and climatic factors that best describe the distributed soil erosion potential following fuel management throughout the basin. Through this analysis we provide recommendations to guide future fuel management based on measurable landscape characteristics. We analyzed sensitive landscape characteristics such as slope length, soil steepness, soil depth, and mean annual precipitation, among other variables, and their effects on soil erosion. Results are displayed in a variety of interactive graphs, tables and descriptive text which aid managers in interpretation. The WEPPcloud analysis and interpretation with the PI-VAT tool was applied to the Lake Tahoe basin to assess the key soil and landscape characteristics driving soil erosion in the basin. Of particular interest to managers in the basin was the sensitivity between soil erosion and slope steepness. The analysis revealed slope steepness, slope length, and annual precipitation drive much of the variability and suggest spatially explicit timber harvest recommendations based on these factors would minimize the risk of erosion following timber harvest for fuel management. These tools provide managers with access to complex result into easy-to-use information for decision making.

Because of past land use changes and changing climate, forests are moving outside of their historical range of variation. As fires become more severe, forest managers are searching for strategies that can restore forest health and reduce fire risk. However, management activities are only one part of a suite of disturbance vectors that shape forest conditions. To account for the range of disturbance intensities and disturbance types (wildfire, bark beetles, and management), we developed a disturbance return interval (DRI) that represents the average return period for any disturbance, human or natural. We applied the DRI to examine forest change in the Lake Tahoe Basin of California and Nevada. We specifically investigated the consequences of DRI on the proportion of high-severity fire and the net sequestration of carbon. In order to test the management component of the DRI, we developed management scenarios with forest managers and stakeholders in the region; these scenarios were integrated into a mechanistic forest landscape model that also accounted for climate change, as well as natural disturbances of wildfire and insect outbreaks. Our results suggest increasing the frequency of disturbances (a lower DRI) would reduce the percentage of high-severity fire on landscape but not the total amount of wildfire in general. However, a higher DRI reduced carbon storage and sequestration, particularly in management strategies that emphasized prescribed fire over hand or mechanical fuel treatments.

. Climate change will accelerate forest mortality due to insects, disease, and wildfire. As a result, substantial resources will be necessary where and when forest managers seek to maintain multiple management objectives. Because of the increasing managerial requirements to offset climate change and related disturbances, the uncertainty about future forest conditions is magnified relative to climate change alone. We provide an analytical approach that quantifies the key drivers of forest change—climate, disturbance, and forest management—using scenarios paired with simulation modeling to forecast and quantify uncertainties in the Lake Tahoe Basin of California and Nevada (USA), a montane seasonally dry conifer forest. We partitioned uncertainty among climate change (including associated changes to wildfire and insect outbreaks), forest management (including thinning, prescribed fire, and fire suppression), and other sources using a fully factorial experimental design and analysis of variance. We focused on three metrics that are important for forest management objectives for the area: forest carbon storage, area burned at high severity, and total area burned by wildfire. Management explained a substantial amount of variance in the short term for area burned at high severity and longer term carbon storage, while climate explained the most variance in total area burned. Our results suggest that simulated extensive management activities will not meet all the desired management objectives. Both the extent and intensity of forest management will need to increase significantly to keep pace with predicted climate and wildfire conditions.

Wildfires play an important ecological role in fire-adapted landscapes throughout California. However, there is a growing awareness that large wildfires in increasingly populated areas incur costs that may not be acceptable to society. Various forest management strategies have been proposed that seek to reduce the prevalence and severity of wildfires in areas where these costs are high. In this study we estimate the financial costs of various hypothetical forest management scenarios in the Lake Tahoe West landscape of Northern California. The objective of the study was to quantify trade-offs and cost constraints that would affect the feasibility of each scenario. The scenarios ranged from minimal forest management to several options for more intensive fuels management that relied to varying degrees on thinning and prescribed burning. We assessed stand-level costs associated with thinning, prescribed burn management, and timber and biomass transport, as well as revenues from timber and energy chips sold. Using modeled fire occurrence and severity metrics, we also used historical wildfire data to estimate plausible fire suppression costs. Our findings suggest that increased forest management, through the use of either hand/mechanical treatments or prescribed fire, can reduce fire suppression costs relative to recent practices by more than US$400,000 per year. These more intensive management scenarios differ in their cost-effectiveness. Scenarios that increase the use of prescribed fire appear to be the more cost-effective management interventions available with annual costs roughly half as much as a scenario focused on increased hand and mechanical thinning. The results are useful for understanding the financial implications of modifying forest management practices designed to lower the private and social costs of wildfire in the region.

Rapid environmental changes challenge the resilience of wildlands. The western portion of the Lake Tahoe Basin in California is an important ecological and cultural hotspot that is at risk of degradation from current and future environmental pressures. Historical uses, fire suppression, and a changing climate have created forest landscape conditions at risk of drought stress, destructive fire, and loss of habitat diversity. We prospectively modeled forest landscape conditions for a period of 100 years to evaluate the efficacy of 5 unique management scenarios in achieving desired landscape conditions. Management scenarios ranged from no management other than fire suppression to applying treatments consistent with historical fire frequencies and extent (i.e., regular and broadscale biomass reduction). We developed a decision support tool to evaluate environmental and social outcomes within a single framework to provide a transparent set of costs and benefits. Results illuminated underlying mechanisms of forest resilience and provided actionable guidance to decision makers. Sixteen attributes were assessed in the model after assigning weights to each. We found that removing forest biomass across the landscape, particularly when accomplished using extensive fire-based removal techniques, led to highly favorable conditions for environmental quality and promoted overall landscape resilience. Environmental conditions resulting from extensive fire-based biomass removal also had nominal variation over time, in contrast with strategies that had less extensive and/or used physical removal techniques (e.g., mechanical thinning). Our analysis provides a transparent approach to assess large datasets with complex and interacting variables. Ultimately, we aim to provide insights into the complexities of maintaining optimal conditions and managing landscapes to promote ecosystem resilience in a changing world.

Smoke from wildfires has become a growing public health issue around the world but especially in western North America and California. At the same time, managers and scientists recommend thinning and intentional use of wildland fires to restore forest health and reduce smoke from poorly controlled wildfires. Because of the changing climate and management paradigms, the evaluation of smoke impacts needs to shift evaluations from the scale of individual fire events to long-term fire regimes and regional impacts under different management strategies. To confront this challenge, we integrated three widely used modeling tools to analyze smoke impacts across different management scenarios within a future of changing climate. We applied this multi-stage framework to a case study analysis in the Lake Tahoe basin, in which managers proposed scenarios that involved varying levels of hand- and mechanical-thinning treatments and prescribed fires. We began by using the LANDIS-II model to project daily emissions of fine particulate matter from wildland fires under various climate and management scenarios over a century. We also modeled dispersion and health impacts based upon individual wildfire events selected to be representative of different management scenarios. For those events, we modeled smoke conveyance to downwind communities from representative future fires using the BlueSky smoke dispersion model. Lastly, we estimated human health impacts resulting from the modeled smoke using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's BenMAP model. Our results suggest that emissions from wildfires will substantially increase in future decades; however, increased levels of forest thinning could substantially reduce those emissions and harmful health impacts from large wildfires. We also found that increased use of prescribed burning could reduce the health impacts associated with large wildfires but would also increase the frequency of low levels of emissions. Furthermore, the modeling results suggested that individual prescribed fires could have substantial health impacts if dispersion conditions are unfavorable. Our results suggest that increased management is likely to yield important benefits given expected increases in wildfire activity associated with climate change. However, there remain many challenges to projecting the effects of alternative management regimes, especially ones that involve substantial increases in intentional burning.

Land managers in the Lake Tahoe basin are considering increasing the use of prescribed fire and forest thinning to restore conditions that will be more resilient to wildfires. However, such restorative treatments also constitute disturbances that could increase sediment and nutrient loads. We examined whether the water-quality impacts from future treatments are likely to be lower compared to the potential impacts from future wildfires under various climate change scenarios. We applied an online interface for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model in combination with a landscape change model (LANDIS-II) to evaluate the effects of different combinations of thinning and prescribed burning on fine sediment (< 2 mm), very fine sediment (< 16 µm), and phosphorus over time. First, we generated results based on historic weather data for soil disturbance conditions, including: an undisturbed baseline, a uniform thinning treatment; a uniform prescribed fire treatment; and uniform low, moderate, and high wildfire burn severity. Residual ground cover declined in that order, and expected loads of sediment and phosphorus increased. We then combined the estimated loads from hillslopes with projected management-disturbance regimes across each decade of the next century. We found that expected sediment and phosphorus loads were lower under the scenario that emphasized thinning, whereas scenarios that increased prescribed burning resulted in loads that were comparable to scenarios that involved less treatment. These results reflect the finding from the WEPP analysis that prescribed burning is expected to reduce ground cover more than is thinning. Our analysis supports efforts to increase fuel reduction treatments to mitigate future wildfires, but it also suggests that preventative treatments may not avoid a long-term decline in water quality as wildfires increase with climate change.

Across the United States, wildfire severity and frequency are increasing, placing many properties at risk of harm or destruction. We quantify and compare how different forest management strategies designed to increase forest resilience and health reduce the number of properties at risk from wildfire, focusing on the Lake Tahoe Basin of California and Nevada. We combine landscape change simulations (including climate change, wildfire, and management effects) with scenarios of current and plausible fuel treatment activities and parcel-scale fire risk analysis. Results suggest that more aggressive fuel treatment activities that treat more area on the landscape, whether through mechanical and hand thinning or prescribed fire, dramatically lower the fire probability in the region and lead to a corresponding lower risk of property loss. We estimate that relative to recent practices of focusing management in the wildland–urban interface, more active forest management can reduce property loss risk by 45%–76%, or approximately 2600–4900 properties. The majority of this risk reduction is for single family residences, which constitute most structures in the region. Further, we find that the highest risk reduction is obtained through strategies that treat a substantially greater area than is currently treated in the region and allows for selective wildfires to burn for resource objectives outside of the wildland–urban interface. These results highlight the importance of more active forest management as an effective tool in reducing the wildfire risk to capital assets in the region.

Abstract Wildfires in many western North American forests are becoming more frequent, larger, and severe, with changed seasonal patterns. In response, coniferous forest ecosystems will transition toward dominance by fire‐adapted hardwoods, shrubs, meadows, and grasslands, which may benefit some faunal communities, but not others. We describe factors that limit and promote faunal resilience to shifting wildfire regimes for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We highlight the potential value of interspersed nonforest patches to terrestrial wildlife. Similarly, we review watershed thresholds and factors that control the resilience of aquatic ecosystems to wildfire, mediated by thermal changes and chemical, debris, and sediment loadings. We present a 2‐dimensional life history framework to describe temporal and spatial life history traits that species use to resist wildfire effects or to recover after wildfire disturbance at a metapopulation scale. The role of fire refuge is explored for metapopulations of species. In aquatic systems, recovery of assemblages postfire may be faster for smaller fires where unburned tributary basins or instream structures provide refuge from debris and sediment flows. We envision that more‐frequent, lower‐severity fires will favor opportunistic species and that less‐frequent high‐severity fires will favor better competitors. Along the spatial dimension, we hypothesize that fire regimes that are predictable and generate burned patches in close proximity to refuge will favor species that move to refuges and later recolonize, whereas fire regimes that tend to generate less‐severely burned patches may favor species that shelter in place. Looking beyond the trees to forest fauna, we consider mitigation options to enhance resilience and buy time for species facing a no‐analog future.

ABSTRACTRapid environmental changes expected in the 21stcentury challenge the resilience of wildlands around the world. The western portion of the Lake Tahoe basin (LTW) in California is an important ecological and cultural hotspot that is at risk of degradation from current and future environmental pressures. Historical uses, fire suppression, and a changing climate have created forest landscape conditions at risk of drought stress, destructive fire, and loss of habitat diversity. We prospectively modeled forest landscape conditions for a period of 100 years to evaluate the efficacy of five unique management scenarios in achieving desired landscape conditions across the 23,600 hectares of LTW. Management scenarios ranged from no management other than fire suppression to applying treatments consistent with historical fire frequencies and extent (i.e., regular and broadscale biomass reduction). We developed a decision support tool to evaluate environmental and social outcomes within a single framework to provide a transparent set of costs and benefits; results illuminated underlying mechanisms of forest resilience and provided actionable guidance to decision makers. Sixteen attributes were assessed in the model after assigning weights to each, derived through a survey of stakeholder priorities, so that the contribution of each attribute to evaluations of scenario performance was influenced by the combined priorities of stakeholders. We found that removing forest biomass across the landscape, particularly when accomplished using extensive fire-based removal techniques, led to highly favorable conditions for environmental quality and promoting overall landscape resilience. Environmental conditions resulting from extensive fire-based biomass removal also had nominal variation over time, in contrast with strategies that had less extensive and/or used physical removal techniques, namely thinning. Our analysis provided a transparent approach to data assessment, considering the priorities of stakeholders, to provide insights into the complexities of maintaining optimal conditions and managing landscapes to promote ecosystem resilience in a changing world.

Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and effects of cultural burning in this region within an ecosystem services framework. Much scholarly literature focuses on why various species harvested from burned areas were important historically, while tribes and recent research increasingly stress a wide range of ecological and cultural benefits afforded by contemporary cultural burning. These tribal values generally align with broader ecological restoration objectives, although Indigenous practitioners espouse holistic views on the benefits of burning rather than focusing narrowly on fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation. While government agencies are motivated to treat more and larger areas to reduce fire risk (expanding pace and scale), tribal practitioners have tended to burn comparatively small areas at one time, and cumulatively due to various constraints. However, they would like to burn more widely and frequently to promote resilience to wildfire and drought; conserve biocultural diversity, maintain traditional knowledge and spiritual values; and provide material goods such as foods, medicines, and fiber materials. Much of the experimental research on the effects of cultural burning has been conducted as graduate research and has tended to look at single burns (sometimes agency prescribed burns or wildfires rather than tribally-led cultural burns) for short periods in very limited contexts. Such studies have found that treatments often promote desirable plant qualities, including reduced incidence of pests and structural qualities that facilitate weaving and other crafts. However, effects on understory plant diversity, wildlife, fruit production, parasites, and other key aspects of resource quality have been more difficult to evaluate due to complex interactions and scale considerations. Expanding long-term tribal collaboratives, including designating cultural management areas with frequent burning, would help to understand the potential to achieve ecocultural restoration objectives.

In fire-adapted forests of the North American Mediterranean-climate zone, conifer regeneration following fire is a critical phase in the development and recovery of ecosystems. In recent years, researchers have developed models and other tools to predict the extent to which natural regeneration will meet desired tree density thresholds. In this chapter we describe the current state of post-fire regeneration modeling, how management and restoration efforts can benefit from these new information sources, and how such efforts can evolve to better meet management needs as the climate warms and fires become more extensive and severe. Additionally, we identify gaps in what the current toolset provides as well as potential directions and challenges for improving these tools in the future.

Post‐fire catchment and water utility managers throughout the world use predictive models to estimate potential erosion risks to aid in evaluating downstream impacts of increased runoff and erosion, and to target critical areas within a fire for applying mitigation practices. Erosion prediction can be complicated by forest road networks. Using novel GIS technology and soil erosion modelling, this study evaluated the effect of roads on surface runoff, erosion and sediment yields following a wildfire and determined that the predictive models were providing reasonable results. The GeoWEPP model was used to simulate onsite erosion and offsite sediment delivery before and after fire disturbance using a 2‐m resolution DEM as the terrain layer. Erosion rates in excess of 4 Mg ha−1 year−1 were predicted mainly from steep moderate and high severity burn areas. Roads influenced surface runoff flow path distributions and sub‐catchment delineations, affecting the spatial distribution of sediment detachment and transport. Roads tended to reduce estimated erosion on slopes below the roads but increases in erosion rates were estimated for road fillslopes. Estimated deposition amounts on roads and in sediment basins were similar to measured amounts. The results confirm that road prisms, culverts and road ditches influence sedimentation processes after wildfire, and they present opportunities to detain eroded sediments.