Breaking Down California's Fire Ecology
KPCC (June 28, 2016)
"Drought affects shrubs and trees differently. What drought does in shrubs is it'll kill some limbs of the shrubs, so it'll be a little bit more dead material, but overall the shrub is stressed and has overall lower fuel moisture. So it means that shrubs can ignite more readily, given the current status of fuel moisture, and that's really driven by the drought. And that's a slightly different story on the forest side, which is exacerbated by this dead tree condition."  Brandon Collins is a research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service. He's also part of UC Berkeley's Fire Science Lab. He joined the KPCC show to explain.