The rate of recovery from Oregon’s recent devastating wildfires will be uneven but the effects will likely be felt for years to come, experts say.

Rebuilding communities will be a long slog, depending on the regulatory requirements and resources available to people who have lost homes and other structures, according to a recent forum of Oregon State University wildfire experts.

It will also be important for towns affected by recent fires to plan for future resilience rather than to instinctively try to resurrect what existed before, said Erica Fischer, an assistant professor who studies wildland-urban interfaces.

“We need to learn our lessons from flooding, that we can’t just keep rebuilding the same way over and over and over again,” she said.

Quantifying the risk of wildfire to human communities is critical, as homes and structures represent highly combustible fuels, but such analysis is currently insufficient, she said.

Because there are so many factors at play, it’s tough to predict exactly how long it will take specific fire-damaged communities to recover, Fischer said.

However, on average, communities need roughly a decade to rebuild after a highly destructive natural disaster, she said.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” Fischer said. “It’s going to happen in waves and at different speeds.”

Protecting humans from wildfire must be integrated into the broader understanding of the role of wildfires, which are often needed in the natural landscape, said Lisa Ellsworth, an assistant professor who studied long-term fire impacts.

“From the ecological perspective, it can be quite beneficial,” she said.

During numerous decades of fire suppression, it’s been rarer to see grasslands and open patches in the affected Oregon forests, she said.

Now, such a patchwork or mosaic of land types can be expected to emerge in the early post-fire period, though such areas may also be more susceptible to invasive species, Ellsworth said.

The range of fire severity across the landscape will determine forest conditions and how they evolve over time, with the most severely burned acres taking the longest to recover, said John Bailey, a professor who studies forest management.

“Areas of low severity — within years, you don’t even realize they’ve burned,” he said.

Water quality effects can also be expected from the wildfires, as water has a tendency to flow over recently burned areas rather than being absorbed into the soil, said Jeff Hatten, an associate professor of forest soils.

Watersheds burned at high severity can expect to see erosion initially increase by 10 times to 100 times, which will also heighten the risk of landslides in those areas, Hatten said.

“The impacts to water quality could last for decades,” he said.

After the highly damaging wildfires that Oregon has experienced this year, people may want to know what factor is to blame: climate change, overstocked forests or human communities in fire-risk areas, said Bailey, the forest management professor.

In reality, there is no single culprit responsible for the situation, he said. “It is all those things and how they interact.”