Fuels and Fuel Treatments

Severe wildfires create pulses of dead trees that influence future fuel loads, fire behavior, and fire effects as they decay and deposit surface woody fuels. Harvesting fire-killed trees may reduce future surface woody fuels and related fire hazards, but the magnitude and timing of post-fire logging effects on woody fuels have not been fully assessed.

Salvage logging has been proposed to reduce post-fire hazardous fuels and mitigate re-burn effects, but debate remains about its effectiveness when considering fuel loadings are dynamic, and re-burn occurrence is stochastic, in time.

With increasing public demand for more intensive biomass utilization from forests, the concerns over adverse impacts on productivity by nutrient depletion are increasing. We remeasured the 1974 site of the Forest Residues Utilization Research and Development in northwestern Montana to investigate long-term impacts of intensive biomass utilization on aspects of site productivity.

Post-fire salvage logging adds another set of environmental effects to recently burned areas, and previous studies have reported varying impacts on vegetation, soil disturbance, and sediment production with limited data on the underlying processes.

Context: Reconstructing historical habitat could help reverse declining animal populations, but detailed, spatially comprehensive data are rare.

The number of large, high-severity fires has increased in the western United States over the past 30 years due to climate change and increasing tree density from fire suppression. Fuel quantity, topography, and weather during a burn control fire severity, and the relative contributions of these controls in mixed-severity fires in mountainous terrain are poorly understood.

Night-time flight searches using night vision goggles have the potential to improve early aerial detection of forest fires, which could in turn improve suppression effectiveness and reduce costs. Two sets of flight trials explored this potential in an operational context.

With the potential for worsening fire conditions, discussion is escalating over how to best reduce effects on urban communities. A widely supported strategy is the creation of defensible space immediately surrounding homes and other structures.

Fuel treatment implementation in dry forest types throughout the western UnitedStates is likely to increase in pace and scale in response to increasing incidence of large wildfires.While it is clear that properly implemented fuel treatments are effective at reducing hazardousfire potential, there are ancillary ecological effects that can impact forest resilience eitherpositively or negatively d

Mechanical mastication is a fuel management technique that disrupts the vertical continuity of forest fuels by shredding of trees and understory vegetation into a highly compacted surface fuel bed.