Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 132
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
Synthesis of Knowledge of Extreme Fire Behavior: Volume II for Fire Behavior Specialists, Researchers, and Meteorologists
Year: 2016
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s definition of extreme fire behavior indicates a level of fire behavior characteristics that ordinarily precludes methods of direct controlaction. One or more of the following is usually involved: high rate of spread, prolific crowning/ spotting, presence of fire whirls, and strong convection column. Predictability is difficultas such fires often influence their environment to some degree and behave erratically, sometimes dangerously. Alternate terms include “blow up” and “fire storm.” Fire managersexamining fires over the last 100 years have come to…
Publication Type: Report
The impact of aging on laboratory fire behaviour in masticated shrub fuelbeds of California and Oregon, USA
Year: 2016
Mastication of shrubs and small trees to reduce fire hazard has become a widespread management practice, yet many aspects of the fire behaviour of these unique woody fuelbeds remain poorly understood. To examine the effects of fuelbed aging on fire behaviour, we conducted laboratory burns with masticated Arctostaphylos spp. and Ceanothus spp. woody debris that ranged from 2 to 16 years since treatment. Masticated fuels that were 10 years or older burned with 18 to 29% shorter flame heights and 19% lower fireline intensities compared with the younger fuelbeds across three different fuel loads…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The ICO Approach to Quantifying and Restoring Forest Spatial Pattern: Implementation Guide. Version 3.0
Year: 2016
This document is intended as a “How To” guide for managers and stakeholders wishing to implement the Individual, Clumps, and Openings (ICO) method for silvicultural prescriptions and/or monitoring. Since its release in 2013, ICO has undergone a lot of development and improvement. In the third version of the guide we have included these important advancements:-Reference data from 4 regions is now available to assist in developing targets for clump sizes.-We developed an Android app to make marking and implementation easier. See section VII (page 38) for link to download.-Innovative…
Publication Type: Report
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
Before Wildfire Strikes: A Handbook for Homeowners and Communities in Southwest Oregon
Year: 2015
This is a manual that helps homeowners and neighborhoods prepare their areas and their homes for wildfire. A fire-adapted community is a community located in a fire-prone area that requires little assistance from firefighters during a wildfire. Residents of these communities accept responsibility for living in a high fire-hazard area. They possess the knowledge and skills to prepare their homes and property to survive wildfire; evacuate early, safely and effectively; and survive, if trapped by wildfire.
Publication Type: Report
Drivers of Wildfire Suppression Costs: Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography
Year: 2015
Over the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies. In recent decades, however, federal spending on wildfire suppression has increased dramatically; suppression spending that on average accounted for less than 20 percent of the USFS’s discretionary funds prior to 2000 had grown to 43 percent of discretionary funds by 2008 (USDA 2009), and 51 percent in 2014 (USDA 2014). Rising suppression costs have created budgetary shortfalls and conflict as money “borrowed” from other budgets often cannot be paid back in full, and resources for…
Publication Type: Report
Not All Fires are Wild - Understanding Fire and Its Use as a Management Tool
Year: 2015
Historically, fires have played an integral role in the vitality of our forests. Fire changes the landscape by altering population densities...
Publication Type: Report
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
Experimental analysis of fire spread across a two-dimensional ridge under wind conditions
Year: 2015
Results from a laboratory-scale investigation of a fire spreading on the windward face of a triangular-section hill of variable shape with wind perpendicular to the ridgeline are reported. They confirm previous observations that the fire enlarges its lateral spread after reaching the ridgeline, entering the leeward face with a much wider front. Reference fire spread velocities were measured and analysed, putting in evidence the importance of the dynamic effect due to flow velocity and its associated horizontal-axis separation vortex strength without dependence on hill geometry. Similar…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire-Adapted Communities: The Next Step in Wildfire Preparedness in Klamath County
Year: 2015
This is a manual that helps homeowners and neighborhoods prepare their areas and their homes for wildfire. A fire-adapted community is a community located in a fire-prone area that requires little assistance from firefighters during a wildfire. Residents of these communities accept responsibility for living in a high fire-hazard area. They possess the knowledge and skills to prepare their homes and property to survive wildfire; evacuate early, safely and effectively; and survive, if trapped by wildfire.
Publication Type: Report
Evaluating crown fire rate of spread predictions from physics-based models
Year: 2015
Modeling the behavior of crown fires is challenging due to the complex set of coupled processes that drive the characteristics of a spreading wildfire and the large range of spatial and temporal scales over which these processes occur. Detailed physics-based modeling approaches such as FIRETEC and the Wildland Urban Interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS) simulate fire behavior using computational fluid dynamics based methods to numerically solve the three-dimensional, time dependent, model equations that govern, to some approximation, the component physical processes and their interactions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Wildfire-relevant climatology of the convective environment of the United States
Year: 2015
Convective instability can influence the behaviour of large wildfires. Because wildfires modify the temperature and moisture of air in their plumes, instability calculations using ambient conditions may not accurately represent convective potential for some fire plumes. This study used the North American Regional Reanalysis to develop a climatology of the convective environment specifically tied to large fire events. The climatology is based on the period 1979–2009 and includes ambient convective available potential energy (CAPE) as well as values when surface air is warmed by 0.5, 1.0 or 2.0…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community Experiences with Wildfires: Actions, Effectiveness, Impacts, and Trends
Year: 2015
Wildfire has become a growing threat for communities across the American West and a complex concern for agencies tasked with community protection. This task has grown more difficult due to the increasing inci-dence of large fires and the continued expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area where human habitations and wildland fuels abut or in-termix. These trends have motivated both federal policies and community-level responses to protect communities, lives, and infrastructure....
Publication Type: Report
A bird’s-eye view: Land-use planning and assessments in Oregon and Washington
Year: 2015
Developing forest lands and agricultural lands for other uses has wide-ranging implications. Land development can affect production from forest and agricultural lands, wildlife habitat quality, the spread of invasive species, water quality, wildfire control, and infrastructure costs. In its attempts to mitigate these effects, Oregon implemented statewide land-use planning laws in the early 1970s. Washington established less prescriptive laws in the 1990s. Policymakers, land managers, and various interest groups want to know the effect these laws have had on land use. Scientists with the…
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
Fire and non-native grass invasion interact to suppress tree regeneration in temperate deciduous forests
Year: 2015
While many ecosystems depend on fire to maintain biodiversity, non-native plant invasions can enhance fire intensity, suppressing native species and generating a fire–invasion feedback. These dynamics have been observed in arid and semi-arid ecosystems, but fire–invasion interactions in temperate deciduous forests, where prescribed fires are often used as management tools to enhance native diversity, have rarely been investigated. Here we evaluated the effects of a widespread invasive grass on fire behaviour in eastern deciduous forests in the USA and the potential effects of fire and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Effectiveness and Limitations of Fuel Modeling Using the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator
Year: 2014
Fuel treatment effectiveness is often evaluated with fire behavior modeling systems that use fuel models to generate fire behavior outputs. How surface fuels are assigned, either using one of the 53 stylized fuel models or developing custom fuel models, can affect predicted fire behavior. We collected surface and canopy fuels data before and 1, 2, 5, and 8 years after prescribed fire treatments across 10 national forests in California. Two new methods of assigning fuel models within the Fire and FuelsExtension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator were evaluated. Field-based values for dead and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Regional projections of the likelihood of very large wildland fires under a changing climate in the contiguous Western United States
Year: 2014
Seasonal changes in the climatic potential for very large wildfires (VLWF ≥ 50,000 ac ~ 20,234 ha) across the western contiguous United States are projected over the 21st century using generalized linear models and downscaled climate projections for two representative concentration pathways (RCPs). Significant (p ≤ 0.05) increases in VLWF probability for climate of the mid-21st century (2031–2060) relative to contemporary climate are found, for both RCP 4.5 and 8.5. The largest differences are in the Eastern Great Basin, Northern Rockies, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, and Southwest.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire behavior in masticated fuels: A review
Year: 2014
Mastication is an increasingly common fuels treatment that redistributes “ladder” fuels to the forest floor to reduce vertical fuel continuity, crown fire potential, and fireline intensity, but fuel models do not exist for predicting fire behavior in these fuel types. Recent fires burning in masticated fuels have behaved in unexpected and contradictory ways, likely because the shredded, compact fuel created when trees and shrubs are masticated contains irregularly shaped pieces in mixtures quite different from other woody fuels. We review fuels characteristics and fire behavior in masticated…
Publication Type: Journal Article