A solution approach is proposed to optimize the selection of landscape cells for inclusion in firebreaks. It involves linking spatially explicit information on a landscape’s ecological values, historical ignition patterns and fire spread behavior.
The western United States is projected to experience more frequent and severe wildfires in the future due to drier and hotter climate conditions, exacerbating destructive wildfire impacts on forest ecosystems such as tree mortality and unsuccessful post-fire regeneration.
Wildfire is a natural disturbance in boreal forest systems that has been predicted to increase in frequency, intensity, and extent due to climate change.
The USDA Forest Service received $5.447 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, providing substantial funding to support implementation of the agency’s 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy between fiscal years 2022 and 2026.
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit.
Wildfires may facilitate climate tracking of forest species moving upslope or north in latitude. For subalpine tree species, for which higher elevation habitat is limited, accelerated replacement by lower elevation montane tree species following fire may hasten extinction risk.
Background. Prescribed fire is a land management tool used extensively across the United States. Owing to health and safety risks, smoke emitted by burns requires appropriate manage- ment. Smoke modelling tools are often used to mitigate air pollution impacts. However, direct comparisons of tools’ predictions are lacking. Aims.
The USDA Forest Service’s Shared Stewardship strategy, announced initially in 2018, is built on a vision of advancing federal partnerships with states and other entities to better accomplish shared forest management priorities at the landscape scale.
In the current century, wildfires have shown an increasing trend, causing a huge amount of direct and indirect losses in society. Different methods and efforts have been employed to reduce the frequency and intensity of the damages, one of which is implementing prescribed fires. Previous works have established that prescribed fires are effective at reducing the damage caused by wildfires.
As human populations expand and land-use change intensifies, terrestrial ecosystems experience concurrent disturbances (e.g., urbanization and fire) that may interact and compound their effects on biodiversity. In the urbanizing landscapes of the southern Appalachian region of the United States of America (US), fires in mesic forests have become more frequent in recent years.