Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 133
Prescribed fire placement matters more than increasing frequency and extent in a simulated Pacific Northwest landscape
Year: 2024
Prescribed fire has been increasingly promoted to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-adapted ecosystems. Yet, the complexities of forest ecosystem dynamics in response to disturbances, climate change, and drought stress, combined with myriad social and policy barriers, have inhibited widespread implementation. Using the forest succession model LANDIS-II, we investigated the likely impacts of increasing prescribed fire frequency and extent on wildfire severity and forest carbon storage at local and landscape scales. Specifically, we ask how much prescribed fire is required to maintain…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests delays the decline of subalpine forests in the southwest United States under projected climate
Year: 2024
- In southwestern US forests, the combined impact of climate change and increased fuel loads due to more than a century of human-caused fire exclusion is leading to larger and more severe wildfires. Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests can mitigate high-severity fire risk, but the effects of these treatments on the vegetation composition and structure under projected climate change remain uncertain.
- We used a forest landscape model to assess the impact of thinning and prescribed burns in dry conifer forests across an elevation gradient, encompassing low-elevation…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Prescribed Burning, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network
Year: 2024
We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire probability estimated from recent climate and fine fuels across the big sagebrush region
Year: 2024
BackgroundWildfire is a major proximate cause of historical and ongoing losses of intact big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities and declines in sagebrush obligate wildlife species. In recent decades, fire return intervals have shortened and area burned has increased in some areas, and habitat degradation is occurring where post-fire re-establishment of sagebrush is hindered by invasive annual grasses. In coming decades, the changing climate may accelerate these wildfire and invasive feedbacks, although projecting future wildfire dynamics requires a better…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Wildfire Progression Simulation and Risk-Rating Methodology for Power Grid Infrastructure
Year: 2024
As the frequency and intensity of power line-induced wildfires increase due to climate-, human- , and infrastructure-related risk drivers, maintaining power system resilience and reducing environmental impacts become increasingly crucial. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology to assess the susceptibility, vulnerability, and risk of power line-induced wildfires for lines and nodes in an electric grid. The methodology integrates a well-established wildfire spread simulator into power flow analysis through a set of analytical steps. The proposed approach is applied to a case study…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Estimating the influence of field inventory sampling intensity on forest landscape model performance for determining high-severity wildfire risk
Year: 2024
Historically, fire has been essential in Southwestern US forests. However, a century of fire-exclusion and changing climate created forests which are more susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Forest managers use a combination of thinning and prescribed burning to reduce forest density to help mitigate the risk of high-severity fires. These treatments are laborious and expensive, therefore optimizing their impact is crucial. Landscape simulation models can be useful in identifying high risk areas and assessing treatment effects, but uncertainties in these models can limit…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Future fire events are likely to be worse than climate projections indicate – these are some of the reasons why
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate projections signal longer fire seasons and an increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days for much of the world including Australia.AimsHere we argue that heatwaves, dynamic fire–atmosphere interactions and increased fuel availability caused by drought will amplify potential fire behaviour well beyond projections based on calculations of afternoon forest fire danger derived from climate models.MethodsWe review meteorological dynamics contributing to enhanced fire behaviour during heatwaves, drawing on examples of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics
Year: 2024
Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls. This delineation revealed that rapidly increasing forest fire emissions in extratropical pyromes, linked to climate change, offset declining emissions in tropical pyromes during 2001 to 2023. Annual emissions tripled in one extratropical pyrome due to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Near-term fire weather forecasting in the Pacific Northwest using 500-hPa map types
Year: 2024
BackgroundNear-term forecasts of fire danger based on predicted surface weather and fuel dryness are widely used to support the decisions of wildfire managers. The incorporation of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns into predictive models may provide additional value in operational forecasting.AimsIn this study, we assess the impact of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns on the occurrence of large wildfires and widespread fire outbreaks in the US Pacific Northwest. Additionally, we examine how discrete upper-air map types can augment subregional models of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Visibility-informed mapping of potential firefighter lookout locations using maximum entropy modelling
Year: 2024
BackgroundSituational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.AimsTo use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.MethodsLidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire management decisions outweigh mechanical treatment as the keystone to forest landscape adaptation
Year: 2024
BackgroundModern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Western larch regeneration more sensitive to wildfire-related factors than seasonal climate variability
Year: 2024
To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the northwestern US. We destructively sampled 1651 seedlings from 57 sites across 32 fires that burned at moderate or high severity between 2000 and 2015; sites were within 100 m of reproductively mature western larch. Using dendrochronological methods, we estimated germination years of seedlings to calculate annual recruitment rates. We used boosted…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tribal stewardship for resilient forest socio-ecosystems
Year: 2024
The Yurok Tribe, along with other tribal communities in northwest California, non-profit organizations, universities, and governmental agencies are working to restore forests and woodlands to be more resilient to wildfires, drought, pests and diseases. Our current work within ancestral Yurok territory is designing and evaluating effects of forest treatments including fuels reduction, tree harvesting, and intentional burning based upon indigenous knowledge and associated traditional stewardship practices. Central to these evaluations are the potential availability, quantity, and quality of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Wildland Firefighters’ Assessments of Structure Defensibility
Year: 2023
In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of smoke modelling tools used to mitigate air quality impacts from prescribed burning
Year: 2023
Background. Prescribed fire is a land management tool used extensively across the United States. Owing to health and safety risks, smoke emitted by burns requires appropriate manage- ment. Smoke modelling tools are often used to mitigate air pollution impacts. However, direct comparisons of tools’ predictions are lacking. Aims. We compared three tools commonly used to plan prescribed burning projects: the Simple Smoke Screening Tool, VSmoke and HYSPLIT. Methods. We used each tool to model smoke dispersion from prescribed burns conducted by the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study
Year: 2023
Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—areincreasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communitiesin fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporatepyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animaldistributionsandabundancetosupportpost-firemanagement.Weusetheblack-backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study todemonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitatassessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using soil moisture information to better understand and predict wildfire danger: a review of recent developments and outstanding questions
Year: 2023
Soil moisture conditions are represented in fire danger rating systems mainly through simple drought indices based on meteorological variables, even though better sources of soil moisture information are increasingly available. This review summarises a growing body of evidence indicating that greater use of in situ, remotely sensed, and modelled soil moisture information in fire danger rating systems could lead to better estimates of dynamic live and dead herbaceous fuel loads, more accurate live and dead fuel moisture predictions, earlier warning of wildfire danger, and better forecasts of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimizing the implementation of a forest fuel break network
Year: 2023
Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires. A key question facing managers is how to scale treatments into manageable project areas that meet operational and administrative constraints, and then prioritize their implementation over time to maximize fire management outcomes. We developed and tested a spatial modeling system to optimize the implementation of a proposed 3,538 km fuel break network…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Projecting live fuel moisture content via deep learning
Year: 2023
Background: Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) is a key environmental indicator used to monitor for high wildfire risk conditions. Many statistical models have been proposed to predict LFMC from remotely sensed data; however, almost all these estimate current LFMC (nowcasting models). Accurate modelling of LFMC in advance (projection models) would provide wildfire managers with more timely information for assessing and preparing for wildfire risk. Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the potential for deep learning models to predict LFMC across the continental United States 3 months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Avoided wildfire impact modeling with counterfactual probabilistic analysis
Year: 2023
Assessing the effectiveness and measuring the performance of fuel treatments and other wildfire risk mitigation efforts are challenging endeavors. Perhaps the most complicated is quantifying avoided impacts. In this study, we show how probabilistic counterfactual analysis can help with performance evaluation. We borrow insights from the disaster risk mitigation and climate event attribution literature to illustrate a counterfactual framework and provide examples using ensemble wildfire simulations. Specifically, we reanalyze previously published fire simulation data from fire-prone landscapes…
Publication Type: Journal Article