Human disruption of climate, habitat, and ignition has altered the behavior of wildland fire at local to continental scales. In many regions, novel fire regimes are emerging that threaten to exceed the capacity for local management to protect human wellbeing and ecosystem function. Simultaneous changes in climate, species composition, and fire management have resulted in extreme fire behavior in many regions. For the Western United States, the emerging novel fire regime consists of more frequent, severe, and intense wildfires, with annual area burned by wildfire having doubled and high-severity wildfire area having increased 8-fold since the 1980s. The impacts of these increasing stresses in the Great Basin is especially pressing when combined with the many years of historically poor resource management. Here we complete a literature review of changing wildfire regimes globally (chapter 1) and a study of how the abiotic and biotic aspects of aquatic ecosystems stabilize after a megafire in the western United States (chapter 2).