How Can Wildfires Benefit Certain Trees? Fire-Adapted Forests Explained
Wildfires regularly make headlines for good reason: they can destroy homes, livelihoods, habitats and vast areas of forest. Yet fire is not ecologically identical everywhere. Some tree and plant species evolved in landscapes where periodic fire is part of the natural cycle, and they possess remarkable adaptations that help them survive—or even reproduce more successfully—after fire. Understanding this does not lessen the urgency of preventing human-caused fires and increasingly extreme fire regimes.
In this article:
Forest fires: a growing global threat
According to World Resources Institute data published in 2025, global forest loss reached record levels in 2024, driven in large part by exceptional fires. Tropical primary rainforest loss alone reached 6.7 million hectares—nearly twice the 2023 level.
That area is roughly the size of Panama, with tropical primary forest disappearing at a rate equivalent to about 18 football pitches every minute. In 2024, fires became the leading driver of tropical primary forest loss in the WRI record, accounting for nearly half of the total.
The consequences for people, climate and biodiversity were severe.
Across the world, fires associated with tree-cover loss in 2024 generated around 4.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions—more than four times the emissions from air travel in 2023, according to WRI.
Millions of people were affected through smoke and poor air quality, pressure on water supplies, damaged ecosystems and risks to health and livelihoods.
Over the longer term, global data show a growing fire-related threat to forests, although fire trends differ greatly between tropical, temperate and boreal ecosystems.
The picture improved somewhat in 2025, according to WRI’s latest global analysis. Tropical primary rainforest loss fell by 36% from the 2024 record, to about 4.3 million hectares. Even so, losses remained well above levels seen a decade earlier, and fires continued to pose a growing threat. In other words, one better year does not remove the long-term wildfire risk.
How some species are adapted to fire
Forests are unquestionably essential ecosystems for life on Earth. Through photosynthesis, water regulation, habitat creation and many other processes, they support biodiversity and human societies. They are also major stores and sinks of carbon. Losing them at large scale is therefore deeply damaging.
Yet some plants evolved in fire-prone ecosystems and possess traits that allow them to survive or reproduce after fire. These species are often described as fire-adapted. Their traits are discussed in forest biodiversity literature and include thick insulating bark, protected buds, resprouting ability and cones that release seeds after heat or drying.
One of the best-known examples is the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), one of the world’s largest tree species by volume. Giant sequoias evolved with recurring fire in California’s Sierra Nevada. Their thick bark helps protect mature trees, while fire can open the forest floor, reduce competing vegetation and create exposed mineral soil where seedlings establish more successfully.
Heat and drying can promote seed release from giant sequoia cones, but fire is part of a larger regeneration process rather than the only trigger. Sequoia groves contain many long-lived trees, including individuals more than two thousand years old. The famous General Sherman is the largest known living single-stem tree by volume, not the largest living organism of any kind.
What about other fire-adapted species?
There are many examples. The cork oak (Quercus suber) survives many low- to moderate-intensity fires thanks to its unusually thick bark. Some pines rely on serotinous cones that retain seeds until heat helps open them. Many Mediterranean and Australian plants can resprout after fire from protected buds or underground organs. These adaptations do not mean the species are immune to fire: very frequent, intense or out-of-season fires can overwhelm even fire-adapted ecosystems.Fire adaptation is therefore about ecological history and degree, not a simple division between trees that ‘like’ fire and trees that do not.
A photographic reminder of what is at stake
Fire adaptation can be fascinating, but wildfire remains a major environmental and human concern, especially as climate change increases the likelihood of hot, dry conditions that favour extreme fire behaviour in many regions.
French photographer Maryvonne Arnaud explored this reality in an exhibition presented in Clermont-Ferrand at the Henri-Lecoq Museum through 26 March 2026. Entitled “+2 degrés/contre-feux”, the exhibition brought together a series of striking photographs documenting major fires in Europe, including on the Greek island of Evia.
The message remains important: fire is part of the natural ecology of some forests, but many damaging fires are started by human activity, and climate change can make fires larger, hotter and harder for forests to recover from.
Protecting trees begins with knowing them. That is why you will find on this blog a growing collection of articles and interviews about the plant world, forest science and our relationship with the Living World.
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