On the Ground: Invasive annual grasses pose a widespread threat to western rangelands, and a strategic and proactive approach is needed to tackle this problem. Oregon partners used new spatial data to develop a geographic strategy for management of invasive annual grasses at landscape scales across jurisdictional boundaries.

• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating.

The postglacial history of vegetation, wildfire, and climate in the Cascade Range (Oregon) is only partly understood. This study uses high-resolution macroscopic charcoal and pollen analysis from a 13-m, 14,500 years sediment record from Gold Lake, located in a montane forest, to reconstruct forest vegetation and fire history.

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing is in close proximity to or intermingled with wildland vegetation, is widespread throughout the United States, but it is unclear how this type of housing development affects public lands.

Recent fire seasons brought a new fire reality to the western US, and motivated federal agencies to explore scenarios for augmenting current fuel management and forest restoration in areas where fires might threaten critical resources and developed areas. To support this effort, we modeled the scheduling of an accelerated forest and fuel management scenario on 76 western US national forests.

Many of the most pressing threats to forests result from complex interactions between multiple stressors and require management on large spatial and temporal scales.

The landscape is an ideal spatial extent for managing forests because many ecological processes and disturbances occur on such scales. Moreover, landscape-level decision-making processes can improve the efficiency of forest management, as when many owners of small parcels increase the economy of scale of their operations by jointly hiring labor or selling products.

Local and regional species extirpations may become more common as changing climate and disturbance regimesaccelerate species’ in situ range contractions. Identifying locations that function as both climate and disturbancerefugia is critical for biodiversity conservation.

Highlights • People with egalitarian cultural traits are more likely to engage in fire mitigation behaviors. • Concern, experience, and proximity all have a positive relationship to engagement in fire mitigation behaviors. • Fire-resistant building materials and landscaping requirements are effective policy tools for homeowner mitigation actions.

For most of the 20th century and beyond, national wildland fire policies concerning fire suppression and fuels management have primarily focused on forested lands. Using summary statistics and landscape metrics, wildfire spatial patterns and trends for non-forest and forest burned area over the past two decades were examined across the U.S, and federal agency jurisdictions.