Declines in Conifer Forest Recovery and Forest Loss From Four Decades of Wildfire in California

California's forests are increasingly being exposed to intense wildfires. Past research has tracked wildfires' impact on these natural lands, yet there remains a critical gap in tracking post‐fire vegetation recovery and its trends, particularly for the extent of different forest types. Here, we developed annual maps of discrete vegetation classes using seasonal satellite surface reflectance and a random forest classifier. We first used our maps to track changes in vegetation cover in the study area from 1985 to 2022. For burned areas between 1985 and 2022, conifer and hardwood forests declined by 14.9% and 22.4%, respectively, but shrublands expanded 22.4%. Next, we quantified vegetation extent recovery in wildfire affected areas as the ratio of the observed post‐fire area to a calculated control area for each vegetation type. We compared recovery fractions for 15 years post‐fire burned in 1986–1996 and 1997–2007 wildfires and found hardwood forest recovery to be stable but with a greater interquartile range (median 99% [IQR: 92%–105%] and 100% [IQR: 77%–106%], respectively), and conifer forest recovery to be significantly declining (87% [IQR: 82%–95%] and 71% [IQR: 65%–82%], respectively). Even though hardwood forests fared better recovery‐wise, recent large and severe wildfire seasons led to a decline of 4.7% in hardwood forests from 2017 to 2022 for the study area. These results depict natural lands in California that are rapidly changing, risking continuation of these trends given large, severe wildfire and climate warming.