Research Database
Displaying 81 - 100 of 114
Cross-boundary cooperation for landscape management: Collective action and social exchange among individual private forest landowners
Year: 2018
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. Despite the potential benefits of managing at the landscape level, cooperation on management activities across property boundaries is rare among private landowners and poorly understood. We used a comparative case study approach to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Service Managers' Perception of Landscapes and Computer Models
Year: 2018
About Go Big or Go Home?: The goals of this research project were to analyze how public land managers and stakeholders in Oregon’s east Cascades can plan and manage at landscape scales using scientific research and participatory simulation modeling (Envision). To learn more, visit: gbgh.forestry.oregonstate.edu
Publication Type: Report
Spatiotemporal patterns of unburned areas within fire perimeters in the northwestern United States from 1984 to 2014
Year: 2018
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Improving forest sampling strategies for assessment of fuel reduction burning
Year: 2017
Land managers typically make post hoc assessments of the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning (FRB), but often lack a rigorous sampling framework. A general, but untested, assumption is that variability in soil and fuel properties increases from small (∼1 m) to large spatial scales (∼10–100 km). Based on a recently published field-based sampling scheme, we addressed the following questions: (i) How much variability is captured in measurements collected at different spatial scales? (ii) What is the optimal number of sampling plots required for statistically robust characterisation of burnt…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Visions of Restoration in Fire-Adapted Forest Landscapes: Lessons from the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program
Year: 2017
Collaborative approaches to natural resource management are becoming increasingly common on public lands. Negotiating a shared vision for desired conditions is a fundamental task of collaboration and serves as a foundation for developing management objectives and monitoring strategies. We explore the complex socio-ecological processes involved in developing a shared vision for collaborative restoration of fire-adapted forest landscapes. To understand participant perspectives and experiences, we analyzed interviews with 86 respondents from six collaboratives in the western U.S., part of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A LiDAR-based analysis of the effects of slope, vegetation density, and ground surface roughness on travel rates for wildland firefighter escape route mapping
Year: 2017
Escape routes are essential components of wildland firefighter safety, providing pre-defined pathways to a safety zone. Among the many factors that affect travel rates along an escape route, landscape conditions such as slope, low-lying vegetation density, and ground surface roughness are particularly influential, and can be measured using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. In order to develop a robust, quantitative understanding of the effects of these landscape conditions on travel rates, we performed an experiment wherein study participants were timed while walking along a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Shared visions, future challenges: a case study of three Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program locations
Year: 2017
The USDA Forest Service is encouraging the restoration of select forest ecosystems through its Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP). Collaboration is often necessary to implement landscape-scale management projects such as these, and a substantial body of research has examined the benefits and limitations of using collaboration as a tool for improving relationships, trust, and other outcomes among stakeholder groups. However, limited research has investigated the use of collaboration to achieve large-scale ecological restoration goals. Restoration poses some unique…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human exposure and sensitivity to globally extreme wildfire events
Year: 2017
Extreme wildfires have substantial economic, social and environmental impacts, but there is uncertainty whether such events are inevitable features of the Earth’s fire ecology or a legacy of poor management and planning. We identify 478 extreme wildfire events defined as the daily clusters of fire radiative power from MODIS, within a global 10 × 10 km lattice, between 2002 and 2013, which exceeded the 99.997th percentile of over 23 million cases of the ΣFRP 100 km−2 in the MODIS record. These events are globally distributed across all flammable biomes, and are strongly associated with extreme…
Publication Type: Journal Article
All Lands Approaches to Fire Management in the Pacific West: A Typology
Year: 2017
Since 2009, the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service has promoted an “all lands approach” to forest restoration, particularly relevant in the context of managing wildfire. To characterize its implementation, we undertook an inventory of what we refer to as fire-focused all lands management (ALM) projects, defined as projects in which fuels reduction treatments are planned or implemented across more than one landownership to reduce wildfire risk or increase forest resilience to wildfire. We focused on regions of Washington, Oregon, and California dominated by dry, fire-prone forests and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Landscape-scale quantification of fire-induced change in canopy cover following mountain pine beetle outbreak and timber harvest
Year: 2017
Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover. Acquisition of pre- and post-fire Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data on the 2012 Pole Creek Fire in central Oregon provided an opportunity to isolate and quantify fire effects coincident with specific agents of change. This study characterizes the influence of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Adapting fuel treatments in a changing climate - Prescribed fire, mechanical treatments, wildfire, and restoration
Year: 2016
The Available Science Assessment Project (ASAP) leads, EcoAdapt and Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, hosted a workshop during the International Association of Wildland Fire’s 5th Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference, in cooperation with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network. The workshop had managers and scientists build on a systematic map of the literature and results of an earlier scientist workshop. Outcomes from the manager and scientist workshop reflect perspectives of 36 participants from 30 organizations, which…
Publication Type: Report
Review of broad-scale drought monitoring of forests: Toward an integrated data mining approach
Year: 2016
Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements. However, derived meteorological indices may not meaningfully capture drought impacts because drought responses can differ substantially among species, sites and regions. Meteorology-based approaches also require the characterization of current…
Publication Type: Journal Article
From Ideas to Action: A Guide to Funding and Authorities for Collaborative Forestry
Year: 2016
This guidebook presents a menu of Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service tools and programs available to implement land stewardship on public and private lands, while providing insider tips and lessons learned. It is intended to increase the understanding of what can be used by community-based practitioners, federal land managers, and individuals to address ecological problems on our public and private lands.
Publication Type: Report
1984–2010 trends in fire burn severity and area for the conterminous US
Year: 2016
Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity. Using a severity metric calculated by modelling the cumulative distribution of differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and Relativized dNBR (RdNBR) data, we examined burn area and burn severity of 4893 historical fires (1984–2010) distributed across the conterminous US (CONUS) and mapped by MTBS. Yearly mean burn severity values (weighted by area), maximum burn severity metric values, mean area of burn, maximum burn area and total burn area were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping post-fire habitat characteristics through the fusion of remote sensing tools
Year: 2016
Post-fire snags provide important resources for cavity nesting communities as well as being subject to timber removal through salvage logging practices. Tools that can characterize their distributions along with other features important as wildlife habitat, such as woody shrub cover, would be useful for research and management purposes. Three dimensional lidar data and Landsat time series disturbance products have both shown varying promise in their ability to characterize aspects of dead biomass and understory cover, but studies exploring the combination of the remote sensing datasets…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Relating Fire-Caused Change in Forest Structure to Remotely Sensed Estimates of Fire Severity
Year: 2016
Fire severity maps are an important tool for understanding fire effects on a landscape. The relative differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) is a commonly used severity index in California forests, and is typically divided into four categories: unchanged, low, moderate, and high. RdNBR is often calculated twice—from images collected the year of the fire (initial assessment) and during the summer of the year after the fire (extended assessment). Both collection times have been calibrated to field measurements, but field data with both pre-fire and post-fire observations of matched plots are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tracking Progress: The Monitoring Process Used in Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Projects in the Pacific Northwest
Year: 2015
Several trends have emerged in recent years that affect the management of the National Forest System, particularly in the western U.S. One is the recognition of landscapes departed from a natural range of variation, especially with implications for wildfire management. Another trend is the economic decline in many rural communities of the western U.S., particularly those based on natural resource activities such as timber production. Finally, there is increasing acceptance of collaborative approaches to forest management. Collaborative approaches endeavor to increase mutual learning among…
Publication Type: Report
Social and economic monitoring for the Lakeview Stewardship Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project
Year: 2015
The Fremont-Winema National Forest and the Lakeview Stewardship Group were awarded funding under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) Program in 2012 for the 662,289 acre Lakeview Stewardship Project. The CFLR Program, administered by the U.S. Forest Service, seeks to increase restoration activities to improve the ecological conditions of forested landscapes while contributing to the social and economic well-being of communities located around national forests.The outcomes from CFLR project activities are monitored both through a standardized reporting framework established…
Publication Type: Report
Sources and implications of bias and uncertainty in a century of US wildfire activity data
Year: 2015
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a wealth of US wildfire activity data available for such analyses, but users must be aware of inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty in the data in order to maximise the integrity and utility of their work. Data for analysis are generally acquired from archival summary reports of the federal or interagency fire organisations; incident-level wildfire reporting systems of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping day-of-burning with coarse-resolution satellite fire-detection data
Year: 2014
Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned. As such, several studies have used fire progression maps – in which the perimeter of an actively burning fire is mapped at a fairly high temporal resolution – or MODIS satellite data to determine the day-of-burning, thereby allowing an evaluation of the influence of daily weather. However, fire progression maps have many caveats, the most substantial being that they are rarely mapped…
Publication Type: Journal Article