Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 190
Heading and backing fire behaviours mediate the influence of fuels on wildfire energy
Year: 2023
Background: Pre-fire fuels, topography, and weather influence wildfire behaviour and fire-driven ecosystem carbon loss. However, the pre-fire characteristics that contribute to fire behaviour and effects are often understudied for wildfires because measurements are difficult to obtain. Aims: This study aimed to investigate the relative contribution of pre-fire conditions to fire energy and the role of fire advancement direction in fuel consumption. Methods: Over 15 years, we measured vegetation and fuels in California mixed-conifer forests within days before and after wildfires, with co-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Different approaches make comparing studies of burn severity challenging: a review of methods used to link remotely sensed data with the Composite Burn Index
Year: 2023
The Composite Burn Index (CBI) is commonly linked to remotely sensed data to understand spatial and temporal patterns of burn severity. However, a comprehensive understanding of the tradeoffs between different methods used to model CBI with remotely sensed data is lacking. To help understand the current state of the science, provide a blueprint towards conducting broad- scale meta-analyses, and identify key decision points and potential rationale, we conducted a review of studies that linked remotely sensed data to continuous estimates of burn severity measured with the CBI and related…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Too hot, too cold, or just right: Can wildfire restore dry forests of the interior Pacific Northwest?
Year: 2023
As contemporary wildfire activity intensifies across the western United States, there is increasing recognition that a variety of forest management activities are necessary to restore ecosystem function and reduce wildfire hazard in dry forests. However, the pace and scale of current, active forest management is insufficient to address restoration needs. Managed wildfire and landscape-scale prescribed burns hold potential to achieve broad-scale goals but may not achieve desired outcomes where fire severity is too high or too low. To explore the potential for fire alone to restore dry forests…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire refugia are robust across Western US forested ecoregions, 1986–2021
Year: 2023
In the Western US, area burned and fire size have increased due to the influences of climate change, long-term fire suppression leading to higher fuel loads, and increased ignitions. However, evidence is less conclusive about increases in fire severity within these growing wildfire extents. Fires burn unevenly across landscapes, leaving islands of unburned or less impacted areas, known as fire refugia. Fire refugia may enhance post-fire ecosystem function and biodiversity by providing refuge to species and functioning as seed sources after fires. In this study, we evaluated whether the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Reduced fire severity offers near-term buffer to climate-driven declines in conifer resilience across the western United States
Year: 2023
Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of chang-ing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A data‐driven analysis and optimization of the impact of prescribed fire programs on wildfire risk in different regions of the USA
Year: 2023
In the current century, wildfires have shown an increasing trend, causing a huge amount of direct and indirect losses in society. Different methods and efforts have been employed to reduce the frequency and intensity of the damages, one of which is implementing prescribed fires. Previous works have established that prescribed fires are effective at reducing the damage caused by wildfires. However, the actual impact of prescribed fire programs is dependent on factors such as where and when prescribed fires are conducted. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven model studying the impact…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire severity infuences large wood and stream ecosystem responses in western Oregon watersheds
Year: 2023
Background. Wildfre is a landscape disturbance important for stream ecosystems and the recruitment of large wood (LW; LW describes wood in streams) into streams, with post-fre management also playing a role. We used a stratifed random sample of 4th-order watersheds that represent a range of pre-fre stand age and fre severity from unburned to entirely burned watersheds to 1) determine whether watershed stand age (pre-fre) or fre severity afected riparianoverstory survival, riparian coarse wood (CW; CW describes wood in riparian areas), LW, or in-stream physical, chemical, and biological…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool: Facilitating Social Learning and a Science of Practice
Year: 2023
Wildfire science, policy, and practice lack systematic means for “tailoring” fire adaptation practices to socially diverse human populations and in ways that aggregate existing lessons. This article outlines the development and initial operationalization of the Fire Adapted Communities Pathways Tool, an inductive set of processes that help facilitate dialogue about needs and priorities for wildfire adaptation strategies across ownership boundaries or partners. We outline the stages and considerations organized by the tool, including how its components build from decades of social science and…
Communicating about Fire, Public Perceptions of Fire and Smoke, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests
Year: 2023
The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in both scientific and policy venues. Using a synthetic control approach to analyze 20 years of satellite-based fire activity data across 124,186 square kilometers of forests in California, we provide evidence that low-intensity fires substantially reduce the risk of future high-intensity fires. In conifer forests, the risk of high-intensity fire is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A global outlook on increasing wildfire risk: Current policy situation and future pathways
Year: 2023
Aimto understand how wildfire risk policies are designed to mitigate the impacts of wildfires. Wildfires are a growing threat in many parts of the world, posing significant risks to human life, and the environment. In recent years, wildfires have increased, driven largely by climate change, human activity, and changes in land-use patterns. Wildfire risk adaptation and mitigation measures vary widely between countries and regions around the world. Therefore, it is essential to develop a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effects of nurse shrubs and biochar on planted conifer seedling survival and growth in a high-severity burn patch in New Mexico, USA
Year: 2023
The synergistic effects of widespread high-severity wildfire and anthropogenic climate change are driving large-scale vegetation conversion. In the southwestern United States, areas that were once dominated by conifer forests are now shrub- or grasslands after high-severity wildfire, an ecosystem conversion that could be permanent without human intervention. Yet, the reforestation of these landscapes is rarely successful, with a mean planted seedling survival of just 25 %. Given these low rates, we carried out a planting experiment to quantify the impacts of biochar as a soil amendment and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prioritizing science efforts to inform decision making on public lands
Year: 2023
Public land management agencies in the US are committed to using science-informed decision making, but there has been little research on the types and topics of science that managers need most to inform their decisions. We used the National Environmental Policy Act to identify four types of science information needed for making decisions relevant to public lands: (1) data on resources of concern, (2) scientific studies relevant to potential effects of proposed actions, (3) methods for quantifying potential effects of proposed actions, and (4) effective mitigation measures. We then used this…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predicting snag fall in an old-growth forest after fire
Year: 2023
Snags, standing dead trees, are becoming more abundant in forests as tree mortality rates continue to increase due to fire, drought, and bark beetles. Snags provide habitat for birds and small mammals, and when they fall to the ground, the resulting logs provide additional wildlife habitat and affect nutrient cycling, fuel loads, and fire behavior. Predicting how long snags will remain standing after fire is essential for managing habitat, understanding chemical cycling in forests, and modeling forest succession and fuels. Few studies, however, have quantified how fire changes snag fall…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The outsized role of California’s largest wildfires in changing forest burn patterns and coarsening ecosystem scale
Year: 2023
Highlights • We evaluated trends for 1,809 fires that burned 1985–2020 across California forests. • Top 1% of fires by size burned 47% of total area burned across the study period. • Top 1% (18 fires) produced 58% of high and 42% of low-moderate severity area. • Top 1% created novel landscape patterns of large burn severity patches. • These large fires create new opportunities for managing forest resilience. Although recent large wildfires in California forests are well publicized in media and scientific literature, their cumulative effects on forest structure and implications for forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using PODs to integrate fire and fuels planning
Year: 2023
BackgroundPotential Wildfire Operational Delineations (PODs) were developed as a pre-season planning tool to promote safe and effective fire response. Past research on PODs has identified uses in an incident management context. There has been little research on how PODs are being utilised in non-incident management contexts to align forest and wildfire planning objectives.AimsWe sought to understand how actors are adopting and adapting the PODs framework to inform non-incident management, and to identify facilitators, barriers and recommendations.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial interactions among short-interval fires reshape forest landscapes
Year: 2023
Aim Ecological disturbances are increasing as climate warms, and how multiple disturbances interact spatially to drive landscape change is poorly understood. We quantified burn severity across fire regimes in reburned forest landscapes to ask how spatial patterns of high-severity fire differ between sequential overlapping fires and how landscape heterogeneity is shaped by cumulative disturbance patterns. We also characterized the amount and configuration of an emerging phenomenon: areas burned as high-severity fire twice in successive fires. Location Northwest USA. Time period 1984–2020.…
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
Potential operational delineations: new horizons for proactive, risk-informed strategic land and fire management
Year: 2022
Background The PODs (potential operational delineations) concept is an adaptive framework for cross-boundary and collaborative land and fire management planning. Use of PODs is increasingly recognized as a best practice, and PODs are seeing growing interest from federal, state, local, tribal, and non-governmental organizations. Early evidence suggests PODs provide utility for planning, communication, coordination, prioritization, incident response strategy development, and fuels mitigation and forest restoration. Recent legislative action codifies the importance of PODs by devoting…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The contribution of Indigenous stewardship to an historical mixed-severity fire regime in British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2022
Indigenous land stewardship and mixed-severity fire regimes both promote landscape heterogeneity, and the relationship between them is an emerging area of research. In our study, we reconstructed the historical fire regime of Ne Sextsine, a 5900-ha dry, Douglas-fir-dominated forest in the traditional territory of the T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation) in British Columbia, Canada. Between 1550 and 1982 CE, we found median fire intervals of 18 years at the plot-level and 4 years at the study site-level. Ne Sextsine was characterized by an historical mixed-severity fire regime, dominated by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burn severity and pre-fire seral state interact to shape vegetation responses to fire in a young, western Cascade Range forest
Year: 2022
Wildfire size and frequency are increasing across the western U.S., affecting large areas of young, second-growth forest originating after logging and burning. Despite their prevalence in the western Cascade landscape, we have a poor understanding of how these young stands respond to fire or how their responses differ from older, undisturbed forests, which are well studied. We explore these questions using pre- and early post-fire data from a young (<30-year-old), naturally regenerating forest in western Oregon that was burned preemptively to limit spread of the 2018 Terwilliger Fire. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article