management

Background

As climate change drives more frequent and intense wildfires, the revitalization of Indigenous fire stewardship grows increasingly urgent. This paper examines the Karuk Tribe's experiences with settler colonialism and their efforts to restore cultural fire stewardship in the wake of the 2020 Slater Fire, which burned 157,000 acres of Karuk ancestral territory.

Reforestation success in areas impacted by high-severity wildfire and seasonal moisture limitations require nursery-grown seedlings capable of establishing and surviving in harsh environments. Drought conditioning (i.e.

In forests adapted to frequent fire, fuel treatments aim to restore resilience by disrupting the horizontal and vertical fuel continuity that drives catastrophic crown fires. Although foundational, traditional plot-scale measurements cannot capture the continuous structural patterns that influence fire behavior at stand or landscape spatial scales.

Forest treatments such as prescribed burns, mastication, and thinning are widely implemented across the western USA to reduce fuels and enhance wildfire resilience. These practices also influence snow accumulation and melt, which, in turn, affect snow storage and duration.

Linear fuel treatments, Fuel Break Networks, are widely implemented in California, USA fuel types to improve firefighter safety and facilitate fire containment. Despite frequent construction, landscape scale evaluations of their effectiveness with fire modeling remain limited in this region.

Background

During periods of heightened wildland fire activity in the United States, multiagency coordinating groups must prioritize among multiple on-going fires to allocate scarce suppression resources.

This study investigates the key drivers influencing prescribed fire effects across 16 sites in northern and central California, with particular emphasis on how operational decisions by fire practitioners shape burn outcomes.

Reducing fuel densities is the primary tool available to improve forest resilience to intensifying disturbance, but implementation is constrained by concern of effects to mature-forest associated species, such as spotted owls (Strix occidentalis).