Topic: Fuels and Fuel Treatments

Despite widespread concern over increases in wildfire severity, the mechanisms underlying this trend remain unclear, hampering our ability to mitigate the severity of future fires. There is substantial uncertainty regarding the relative roles of extreme weather conditions, which are exacerbated…

The sagebrush biome in the western United States is a focus of widespread conservation concern due to multiple interacting threats including larger, more severe wildfires. Given the immense scale of the region and limited resources, prioritizing restoration treatments is essential for optimizing…

Managers across the western US seek effective fuel treatment strategies to mitigate hazardous fuel loads and risks of high severity fire in dry conifer forests. Conventional fuel hazard reduction treatments emphasis reducing canopy fuel continuity and surface fuel loading using an even spaced,…

Wildfire activity has accelerated with climate change, sparking concerns about uncharacteristic impacts on mature and old-growth forests containing large trees. Recent assessments have documented fire-induced losses of large-tree habitats in the US Pacific Northwest, but key uncertainties remain…

The social diversity of human populations living in or near wildfire-prone lands are an important influence on the scale at which wildfire mitigation action can occur among residential populations at increasing risk from wildfire. The research presented in this paper explores how fire adaptation…

Wildfires in the western US increasingly threaten infrastructure, air quality, and public health. Prescribed (“Rx”) fire is often proposed to mitigate future wildfires, but treatments remain limited, and few studies quantify their effectiveness on recent major wildfires. We investigate the…

Aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests are generally thought to impede fire spread, yet the extent of this effect is not well quantified in relation to other vegetation types. We examined the influence of aspen cover on interpolated daily fire spread rates, the relative abundance of aspen…

Background. Fuel treatments are increasingly used to mitigate wildfire risks. 

Aims. Proposing a novel, scalable and transferable methodology, this study investigates which treatment is (more) effective at a regional scale. 

Methods. This research evaluates the…

Background

Wildfires in western U.S. dry forest ecosystems have increased in size and severity during recent decades due primarily to more than a century of fire suppression, exclusion of Indigenous fire, and a rapidly warming climate. Fuel treatments have been employed to restore…

Warming temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation patterns are reducing winter snowpack and critical late-season streamflows. Here, we used two models (LANDIS-II and DHSVM) in linked simulations to evaluate the effects of wildfire and forest management scenarios on future snowpack and…