Topic: Fire Effects and Fire Ecology

Seeding following high-severity wildfires is motivated by the goals of increasing vegetative cover and decreasing bare soil in order to minimise soil erosion and exotic plant invasions. We compared the ground cover and vegetation response of seeded versus non-seeded areas located in the Warm…

Harvest of dead timber following wildfire is contentious because of a perception that the benefits are outweighed by environmental costs. One primary concern is the potential for increased erosion susceptibility associated with timber extraction (i.e. salvage logging) and site preparation. We…

Patches of live, dead, and dying trees resulting from bark beetle-caused mortality alter spatial and temporal variability in the canopy and surface fuel complex through changes in the foliar moisture content of attacked trees and through the redistribution of canopy fuels. The resulting…

Pile burning is a common means of disposing the woody residues of logging and for post-harvest site preparation operations, in spite of the practice’s potential negative effects. To examine the long-term implications of this practice we established a 50-year sequence of pile burns within…

Periodic fire is thought to improve whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) regeneration by reducing competition and creating openings, but the mechanisms by which fire affects seedling establishment are poorly understood. I compared seedling vegetation production in adjacent sites, one last…

Questions: Wildfire is a natural disturbance that shapes vegetation characteristics worldwide, while prescribed fire is increasingly used to modify vegetation composition and structure. Due to invasion of many ecosystems by exotic species, a concern of land managers is whether wildfire and…

1. Climate change is likely to shift plant communities towards species from warmer regions, a processtermed ‘thermophilization’. In forests, canopy disturbances such as fire may hasten this processby increasing temperature and moisture stress in the understory, yet little is known about the…

Large wildfires of increasing frequency and severity threaten local populations and natural resources and contribute carbon emissions into the earth-climate system. Although wildfires have been researched and modeled for decades, no verifiable physical theory of spread is available to form the…

The probability of stem survival after fire is strongly influenced by energy allocation to bark because bark thickness affects heat transfer during fire. Greater relative investment in inner bark versus outer bark should also enhance survival because of greater moisture content of inner bark. We…

Fire is one of the most important natural disturbance processes in the western United States and ecosystems differ markedly with respect to their ecological and evolutionary relationships with fire. Reference fire regimes in forested ecosystems can be categorized along a gradient ranging from “…