5 CONCLUSIONS
Together, our results suggest that generalizable spatial trends of wildfire effects on water quality are often masked due to variability in system responses influenced by watershed characteristics. A mechanistic understanding of the relationships between watershed characteristics and water quality responses is important for generating scalable, predictive frameworks linking wildfire impacts to watershed hydro-biogeochemistry. Generalizable mechanisms linked to catchment characteristics would improve our ability to to use specific catchment characteristics to parameterize predictive models of fire effects on downstream aquatic ecosystems (Ball et al., 2021; Wampler et al., 2023).