Research Database
Displaying 281 - 300 of 393
Achievable future conditions as a framework for guiding forest conservation and management
Year: 2016
We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and management will be inadequate given the predicted scale of social-economic and biophysical changes in the 21st century. New approaches, focused on anticipating and guiding ecological responses to change, are urgently needed to ensure the full value of forest ecosystem services for future generations. These approaches acknowledge that change is inevitable and sometimes irreversible, and that maintenance of ecosystem services depends in part on novel ecosystems, i.e., species combinations with no analog in the past. We propose…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Towards a new paradigm in fire severity research using dose-response experiments
Year: 2016
This study presents an alternative approach to developing severity assessments. A synthesis of challenges using current approaches is presented. The proposed approach links heat transfer dose–response experimental treatments with plant physiology response metrics. The potential of this new approach is demonstrated via a case study.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tree mortality and structural change following mixed-severity fire in Pseudotsuga forests of Oregon’s western Cascades, USA
Year: 2016
Mixed-severity fires are increasingly recognized as common in Pseudotsuga forests of the Pacific Northwest and may be an important mechanism for developing or maintaining their structural diversity and complexity. Questions remain about how tree mortality varies and forest structure is altered across the disturbance gradient imposed by these fires. Therefore, we sampled live and dead trees at 45–1.0 ha plots, each with four 0.10 ha nested subplots, stratified across an unburned, low, moderate and high-severity fire gradient. Burned plots were primarily sampled 10 and 22 years post-fire,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burning the legacy? Influence of wildfire reburn on dead wood dynamics in a temperate conifer forest
Year: 2016
Dynamics of dead wood, a key component of forest structure, are not well described for mixed- severity fi re regimes with widely varying fi re intervals. A prominent form of such variation is when two stand- replacing fi res occur in rapid succession, commonly termed an early- seral “reburn.” These events are thought to strongly infl uence dead wood abundance in a regenerating forest, but this hypothesis has scarcely been tested. We measured dead wood following two overlapping wildfi res in coniferdominated forests of the Klamath Mountains, Oregon (USA), to assess whether reburning (15- yr…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges
Year: 2016
Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse, international and interdisciplinary expertise, we outline generalizable properties of fire-adaptive communities in varied settings where cultural knowledge of fire is rich and diverse. At the national scale, we discussed policy and management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining alternative fuel management strategies and the relative contribution of National Forest System land to wildfire risk to adjacent homes – A pilot assessment on the Sierra National Forest, California, USA
Year: 2016
Determining the degree of risk that wildfires pose to homes, where across the landscape the risk originates, and who can best mitigate risk are integral elements of effective co-management of wildfire risk. Developing assessments and tools to help provide this information is a high priority for federal land management agencies such as the US Forest Service (USFS) that have limited resources to invest in hazardous fuel reduction and other mitigation activities. In this manuscript we investigate the degree to which fuel management practices on USFS land can reduce wildfire exposure to human…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The economic benefit of localised, short-term, wildfire-potential information
Year: 2015
Wildfire-potential information products are designed to support decisions for prefire staging of movable wildfire suppression resources across geographic locations. We quantify the economic value of these information products by defining their value as the difference between two cases of expected fire-suppression expenditures: one in which daily information about spatial variation in wildfire-potential is used to move fire suppression resources throughout the season, and the other case in which daily information is not used and fire-suppression resources are staged in their home locations all…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Wildfire Mitigation Activities in the Wildland-Urban Interface
Year: 2015
We assessed wildfire mitigation activities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of New Mexico to identifywhich strategies are most effective. First, we modeledhow fuel treatments change wildfire behavior in 12 WUI areas.The second element of our analysis used data from over 2,000assessments of home wildfire hazard to better understand howthose hazards are distributed and change over time. We examinedthe Firewise communities in New Mexico because of the importantrole the Firewise program plays in public wildfire educationnationally. The fourth element of our assessment examined nineCommunity…
Publication Type: Report
Species composition influences management outcomes following mountain pine beetle in lodgepole pine-dominated forests
Year: 2015
Mountain pine beetle outbreaks have killed lodgepole pine on more than one million hectares of Colorado and southern Wyoming forest during the last decade and have prompted harvest operations throughout the region. In northern Colorado, lodgepole pine commonly occurs in mixed stands with subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, and aspen. Variation in tree species composition will influence structure, fuel profiles and fire hazard as forests recover from bark beetle outbreaks, and this diversity has implications for design and implementation of fuel reduction treatments. We used stand inventory data…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Western Juniper Management: Assessing Strategies for Improving Greater Sage-grouse Habitat and Rangeland Productivity
Year: 2015
Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis subsp. occidentalis) range expansion into sagebrush steppe ecosystems has affected both native wildlife and economic livelihoods across western North America. The potential listing of the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) under the U.S. Endangered Species Act has spurred a decade of juniper removal efforts, yet limited research has evaluated program effectiveness. We used a multi-objective spatially explicit model to identify optimal juniper removal sites in Northeastern California across weighted goals for ecological (sage-grouse habitat…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Principles of effective USA Federal Fire Management Plans
Year: 2015
Federal fire management plans are essential implementation guides for the management of wildland fire on federal lands. Recent changes in federal fire policy implementation guidance and fire science information suggest the need for substantial changes in federal fire management plans of the United States. Federal land management agencies are also undergoing land management planning efforts that will initiate revision of fire management plans across the country. Using the southern Sierra Nevada as a case study, we briefly describe the underlying framework of fire management plans, assess their…
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
Reform forest fire management
Year: 2015
Globally, wildfire size, severity, and frequency have been increasing, as have related fatalities and taxpayer-funded firefighting costs (1). In most accessible forests, wildfire response prioritizes suppression because fires are easier and cheaper to contain when small (2). In the United States, for example, 98% of wildfires are suppressed before reaching 120 ha in size (3). But the 2% of wildfires that escape containment often burn under extreme weather conditions in fuel-loaded forests and account for 97% of fire-fighting costs and total area burned (3). Changing climate and decades of…
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
Wildland Fuel Fundamentals and Applications
Year: 2015
A new era in wildland fuel sciences is now evolving in such a way that fire scientists and managers need a comprehensive understanding of fuels ecology and science to fully understand fire effects and behavior on diverse ecosystem and landscape characteristics. This is a reference book on wildland fuel science; a book that describes fuels and their application in land management. There has never been a comprehensive book on wildland fuels; most wildland fuel information was put into wildland fire science and management books as separate chapters and sections. This book is the first to…
Publication Type: Book
Winter grazing can reduce wildfire size, intensity and behaviour in a shrub-grassland
Year: 2015
An increase in mega-fires and wildfires is a global issue that is expected to become worse with climate change. Fuel treatments are often recommended to moderate behaviour and decrease severity of wildfires; however, the extensive nature of rangelands limits the use of many treatments. Dormant-season grazing has been suggested as a rangeland fuel treatment, but its effects on fire characteristics are generally unknown. We investigated the influence of dormant-season (winter) grazing by cattle (Bos taurus) on fuel characteristics, fire behaviour and area burned in Wyoming big sagebrush (…
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
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