Large Recreation Declines Persist for Years after Severe Wildfire but Not after Low-Severity or Prescribed Fire

Wildfire and recreational use of public lands have surged, particularly across the US West.In response to intensifying wildfire, land managers are also expanding prescribed fire for fuel-reduction.Yet how either fire type reshapes visitation, remains poorly quantified, limiting managers' ability to account for important hidden values provided by public lands.We analyze wildfire and prescribed fire sites (N = 185 and 54, respectively) across California and Colorado public lands, advancing a casual inference approach that leverages 11 million digital-mobility observations, from cell phones, social media, and citizen science apps, in a visitation model.This is the first landscape-scale causally-identified estimate of how fire type, severity, and social-ecological context shape public land visitation over time.Wildfires reduced visitation (-8% to -18% one year post-fire), with impacts scaling with severity.High-severity fires in California produced persistent losses (-33% year one; -44% year five), whereas low-severity effects remained near-neutral across both states.Forested sites drove losses while grassland fires produced minimal impacts.Prescribed fire effects were state-dependent (positive in Colorado, negative in California) but transient, with no effect after three years.High-recreation counties experienced disproportionate wildfire impacts in Colorado (-11% vs. -2%) and in California for high-severity fires (-28% vs -8%).Fire characteristics and social-ecological systems jointly determine recreational outcomes and provide empirical foundations for fire management that accounts for recreational use and its value.We provide a novel addition to quantify the value of non-material contributions of nature at the state level, expanding our ability to measure cultural ecosystem services at scale. Significance StatementFire management decisions on public lands often overlook recreation and other non-material benefits of nature, in part because evidence is lacking on how fire reshapes human-nature relationships.Resolving the impacts of fire and fuels management on recreation is especially urgent in the Western United States, where the majority of the ~1 billion annual visits to US public lands occur and where fire regimes are intensifying toward larger, more severe events.We show that higher-severity fires cause large, persistent declines in recreation, whereas prescribed fire and low-severity wildfire have neutral or even positive effects, not compromising recreational values.These findings support integrating non-material contributions of nature into fire management, climate adaptation, and equity-focused investment for communities most vulnerable to climate change.