Research Database
Displaying 181 - 200 of 237
Limitations and utilisation of Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity products for assessing wildfire severity in the USA
Year: 2015
The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity project is a comprehensive fire atlas for the United States that includes perimeters and severity data for all fires greater than a particular size (~400 ha in the western US, and ~200 ha in the eastern US). Although the database was derived for management purposes, the scientific community has expressed interest in its research capacity. As with any derived data, it is critical to understand inherent limitations to maximise the utility of the dataset without compromising the inferences. The classified severity product in particular is of limited use to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The climate space of fire regimes in north-western North America
Year: 2015
Aim Studies of fire activity along environmental gradients have been undertaken, but the results of such studies have yet to be integrated with fire-regime analysis. We characterize fire-regime components along climate gradients and a gradient of human influence. Location We focus on a climatically diverse region of north-western North America extending from northern British Columbia, Canada, to northern Utah and Colorado, USA. Methods We used a multivariate framework to collapse 12 climatic variables into two major climate gradients and binned them into 73 discrete climate domains. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical northern spotted owl habitat and old-growth dry forests maintained by mixed-severity wildfires
Year: 2015
Context: Reconstructing historical habitat could help reverse declining animal populations, but detailed, spatially comprehensive data are rare. For example, habitat for the federally threatened Northern spotted owl (NSO; Strix occidentalis caurina) was thought historically rare because low-severity fires kept forests open and habitat restricted to fire refugia, but spatial historical data are lacking. Objectives: Here I use public land-surveys to spatially reconstruct NSO habitat and old-growth forests in dry forests in Oregon's Eastern Cascades in the late-1800s. I used reconstructions of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Local Ecological Knowledge and Fire Management: What Does the Public Understand?
Year: 2015
As fire management agencies seek to implement more flexible fire management strategies, local understanding and support for these strategies become increasingly important. One issue associated with implementing more flexible fire management strategies is educating local populations about fire management and identifying what local populations know or do not know related to fire management. This study used survey data from three 2010 wildland fires to understand how ecological knowledge and education level affected fire management perception and understanding. Results indicated that increased…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Vegetation Response to Burn Severity, Native Grass Seeding, and Salvage Logging
Year: 2015
As the size and extent of wildfires has increased in recent decades, so has the cost and extent of post-fire management, including seeding and salvage logging. However, we know little about how burn severity, salvage logging, and post-fire seeding interact to influence vegetation recovery long-term. We sampled understory plant species richness, diversity, and canopy cover one to six years post fire (2006 to 2009, and 2011) on 72 permanent plots selected in a stratified random sample to define post-fire vegetation response to burn severity, post-fire seeding with native grasses, and salvage…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire severity in southwestern Colorado unaffected by spruce beetle outbreak
Year: 2015
Recent large and severe outbreaks of native bark beetles have raised concern among the general public and land managers about potential for amplified fire activity in western North America. To date, the majority of studies examining bark beetle outbreaks and subsequent fire severity in the U.S. Rocky Mountains have focused on outbreaks of mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) forests, but few studies, particularly field studies, have addressed the effects of the severity of spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis Kirby) infestation on subsequent…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recovery of small pile burn scars in conifer forests of the Colorado Front Range
Year: 2015
The ecological consequences of slash pile burning are a concern for land managers charged with maintaining forest soil productivity and native plant diversity. Fuel reduction and forest health management projects have created nearly 150,000 slash piles scheduled for burning on US Forest Service land in northern Colorado. The vast majority of these are small piles (<5 m diameter). Similar to larger piles, we found that burning small piles had significant immediate effects on soil nutrients and physical and chemical properties and native plant cover. To evaluate the need to rehabilitate…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance
Year: 2015
Prompted by a series of increasingly destructive, expensive, and highly visible wildfire crises in human communities across the globe, a robust body of scholarship has emerged to theorize, conceptualize, and measure community-level resilience to wildfires. To date, however, insufficient consideration has been given to wildfire resilience as a process of adaptive governance mediated by institutions at multiple scales. Here we explore the possibilities for addressing this gap through an analysis of wildfire resilience among wildland-urban interface communities in the western region of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel and vegetation trends after wildfire in treated versus untreated forests
Year: 2015
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to increased interest in managing forests for resiliency to future disturbances. Comparing and contrasting treated versus untreated stands through multiple growing seasons postfire provide an opportunity to understand processes driving responses and can guide management decisions regarding resiliency. In treated and untreated forests, we compared fire effects 2‐10 growing seasons following fire on 3 different fires in New Mexico and Arizona. We estimated understory cover, standing crop, fuel loading, and basal area in (1) lop, pile, burn; (2…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing adaptive capacity for restoring fire-dependent ecosystems: the Fire Learning Network’s Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges
Year: 2015
Prescribed fire is a critical tool for promoting restoration and increasing resilience in fire-adapted ecosystems, but there are barriers to its use, including a shortage of personnel with adequate ecological knowledge and operational expertise to implement prescribed fire across multijurisdictional landscapes. In the United States, recognized needs for both professional development and increased use of fire are not being met, often because of institutional limitations. The Fire Learning Network has been characterized as a multiscalar, collaborative network that works to enhance the adaptive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland fire management: insights from a foresight panel
Year: 2015
Wildland fire management faces unprecedented challenges in the 21st century: the increasingly apparent effects of climate change, more people and structures in the wildland-urban interface, growing costs associated with wildfire management, and the rise of high-impact fires, to name a few. Given these significant and growing challenges, conventional fire management approaches are unlikely to be effective in the future. Innovative and forward-looking approaches are needed. This study explored wildland fire management futures by using methods and diverse perspectives from futures research. To…
Publication Type: Report
Topography, fuels, and fire exclusion drive fire severity of the Rim Fire in an old-growth mixed-conifer forest, Yosemite National Park, USA
Year: 2015
The number of large, high-severity fires has increased in the western United States over the past 30 years due to climate change and increasing tree density from fire suppression. Fuel quantity, topography, and weather during a burn control fire severity, and the relative contributions of these controls in mixed-severity fires in mountainous terrain are poorly understood. In 2013, the Rim Fire burned a previously studied 2125 ha area of mixed-conifer forest in Yosemite National Park. Data from 84 plots sampled in 2002 revealed increases in tree density, basal area, and fuel buildup since 1899…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recent mountain pine beetle outbreaks, wildfire severity, and postfire tree regeneration in the US Northern Rockies
Year: 2014
Widespread tree mortality caused by outbreaks of native bark beetles (Circulionidae: Scolytinae) in recent decades has raised concern among scientists and forest managers about whether beetle outbreaks fuel more ecologically severe forest fires and impair postfire resilience. To investigate this question, we collected extensive field data following multiple fires that burned subalpine forests in 2011 throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains across a spectrum of prefire beetle outbreak severity, primarily from mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae). We found that recent (2001–2010)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Clearcutting and high severity wildfire have comparable effects on growth of direct-seeded interior Douglas-fir
Year: 2014
The degree to which harvesting can achieve comparable beneficial effects to wildfire on seedling establishment is a key factor in understanding regeneration dynamics in dry interior forest ecosystems. We compared the capacity of harvesting versus wildfire to support establishment of directly-seeded interior Douglas-fir over a three-year period in the interior Douglas-fir biogeoclimatic zone of British Columbia. The mixed-severity McLure Fire of August 2003 affected over 26,000 hectares in the central British Columbia, Canada. Within the fire-affected area, we assessed growth performance in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and fuels
Year: 2014
Recent studies of historical fire regimes indicate that fires occurring prior to Euro-American settlement were characterized by a high degree of spatial complexity that was driven by heterogeneity in vegetation/fuels and topography and influenced by variability in climate, which mediated the timing, effects, and extents of fires over time. Although there are many important lessons to learn from the past, we may not be able to rely completely on past forest conditions to provide us with blueprints for current and future forest management. Rather than attempting to achieve a particular forest…
Publication Type: Report
Landscape restoration of a forest with a historically mixed-severity fire regime: What was the historical landscape pattern of forest and openings?
Year: 2014
Forest management of dry forests in the western US that historically experienced mixed-severity fire regimes is increasingly focused on landscape-scale restoration. However, this restoration effort is constrained by historic range of variation (HRV) reference conditions that lack information concerning the spatial configuration of these forests at intermediate scales (approximately 0.01–100 ha). I used reconstruction methods to map historical (1860) pattern of ponderosa pine-Douglas-fir forests along twenty 1 km long transects on Colorado’s Front Range and compared pre-settlement opening and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Briefing: Climate and Wildfire in Western U.S. Forests
Year: 2014
Wildfire in western U.S. federally managed forests has increased substantially in recent decades, with large (>1000 acre) fires in the decade through 2012 over five times as frequent (450 percent increase) and burned area over ten times as great (930 percent increase) as the 1970s and early 1980s. These changes are closely linked to increased temperatures and a greater frequency and intensity of drought. Projected additional future warming implies that wildfire activity may continue to increase in western forests. However, the interaction of changes in climate, fire and other disturbances…
Publication Type: Conference Proceedings
The Ecology and Management of Moist Mixed-Conifer Forests in Eastern Oregon and Washington: a Synthesis of the Relevant Biophysical Science and Implications for Future Land Management
Year: 2014
Land managers in the Pacific Northwest have reported a need for updated scientific information on the ecology and management of mixed-conifer forests east of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington. Of particular concern are the moist mixed-conifer forests, which have become drought-stressed and vulnerable to high-severity fire after decades of human disturbances and climate warming. This synthesis responds to this need. We present a compilation of existing research across multiple natural resource issues, including disturbance regimes, the legacy effects of past management actions,…
Publication Type: Report
Fire severity and tree regeneration following bark beetle outbreaks: the role of outbreak stage and burning conditions
Year: 2014
The degree to which recent bark beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) outbreaks may influence fire severity and postfire tree regeneration is of heightened interest to resource managers throughout western North America, but empirical data on actual fire effects are lacking. Outcomes may depend on burning conditions (i.e., weather during fire), outbreak severity, or intervals between outbreaks and subsequent fire. We studied recent fires that burned through green-attack/red-stage (outbreaks <3 years before fire) and gray-stage (outbreaks 3–15 years before fire) subalpine forests dominated by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severity of an uncharacteristically large wildfire, the Rim Fire, in forests with relatively restored frequent fire regimes
Year: 2014
The 2013 Rim Fire, originating on Forest Service land, burned into old-growth forests within Yosemite National Park with relatively restored frequent-fire regimes (¡Ý2 predominantly low and moderate severity burns within the last 35 years). Forest structure and fuels data were collected in the field 3-4 years before the fire, providing a rare chance to use pre-existing plot data to analyze fire effects. We used regression tree and random forests analysis to examine the influence of forest structure, fuel, fire history, topographic and weather conditions on observed fire severity in the Rim…
Publication Type: Journal Article