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).