Research Database
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The Ecological Importance of Severe Wildfires: Some Like it Hot
Year: 2008
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically. It remains unclear, however, how far these generalizations can be extrapolated in time and space, and how well they apply to the more mesic ponderosa pine systems and to other forest systems within the western United States.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burned landscapes of southwestern Oregon: what's in it for Northern Spotted Owls?
Year: 2008
Northern spotted owls are known to spend time in areas burned by wildfire, but there has been little scientific investigation of how and why they use these landscapes. A trio of wildfires in southwestern Oregon during the summers of 2001 and 2002 burned through dozens of documented spotted owl territories, providing a rare opportunity to study many important aspects of how these raptors respond to wildfire in dry forest ecosystems. For this project researchers used radio telemetry and demographic surveys to investigate habitat selection, home range size, occupancy, productivity and survival…
Publication Type: Report
In a Ponderosa Pine Forest, Prescribed Fires Reduce the Likelihood of Scorched Earth
Year: 2008
The Malheur National Forest is located in the Blue Mountains on Oregon’s eastern side, the portion of the state that lies east of the Cascade Crest. In the mid 1990s, researchers and land managers conceived a suite of experiments to explore the effects of prescribed fire on forest health. The studies were designed to coincide with prescribed burns conducted by the USDA Forest Service. The experiments took place in the Emigrant Creek Ranger District, a remote area dominated by ponderosa pine. One of the research projects aimed to assess soil health after different intervals of fire frequency…
Publication Type: Report
Behavior Modification: Tempering Fire at the Landscape Level
Year: 2008
With a history of management choices that have suppressed fire in the West, ecosystems in which fire would play a vital role have developed tremendous fuel loads. As a result, conditions are prime for fires to grow large, escape attack measures, and become catastrophic conflagrations that damage watersheds, forest resources, and homes. With a quiver of treatment options, land managers have successfully used prescribed burning and thinning to modify landscapes at the stand level. But planning treatments to modify fuel build up on a patch of forest is vastly different than planning treatments…
Publication Type: Report