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Increased fuel loads from over a century of fire exclusion, combined with increasing temperatures and drought, are driving increased fire sizes and severity in the western United States (Westerling et al., 2006; Mallek et al., 2013) and the southwestern US (Singleton et al. 2019; Mueller et al. 2020). The Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico are the southern extent of the Rocky Mountains and contain a unique combination of wildland urban interface and municipal water supplies superimposed on a gradient of fire-adapted vegetation types and corresponding fire regimes. Fire history case studies in the area suggest that the historical fire regime in the dry conifer forests was historically dominated by low-severity fire (Margolis and Balmat, 2009) and that large patches of highseverity fire historically occurred in the higher elevation subalpine and aspen forests of the Sangre de Cristos (Margolis et al., 2007).

Recent fires in the region (eg, 2011 Pacheco and Las Conchas, and 2013 Jaroso Fires) have burned with uncharacteristic large patches of high severity across the elevation and forest type gradient, including in the Pecos Wilderness just northeast of Santa Fe. A similar fire in the Santa Fe watershed and adjacent watersheds (hereafter the Santa Fe Fireshed) would result in post-fire flooding and debris flows that would jeopardize the municipal water supply, risk life and property in the wildland urban interface, and likely catalyze conversion of forests to non-forested shrub or grasslands in the dry conifer forests (Guiterman et al. 2018).