Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 99
Effects of harvest, fire, and pest/pathogen disturbances on the West Cascades ecoregion carbon balance
Year: 2015
Disturbance is a key influence on forest carbon dynamics, but the complexity of spatial and temporal patterns in forest disturbance makes it difficult to quantify their impacts on carbon flux over broad spatial domains.Here we used a time series of Landsat remote sensing images and a climate-driven carbon cycle process model to evaluate carbon fluxes at the ecoregion scale in western Oregon.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire, Fuels, and Streams: The Effects and Effectiveness of Riparian Treatments
Year: 2015
Fire is an important disturbance in riparian systems—consuming vegetation; increasing light;creating snags and debris flows; altering habitat structure; and affecting stream conditions, erosion, andhydrology. For many years, land managers have worked to keep fire out of riparian systems through theuse of buffers. A number of projects funded by the Joint Fire Science Program are shedding light onthe dynamics of fire in riparian systems. Recent research and field practice have shown that (1) ripariantreatments can be beneficial and are not as risky as previously thought; and (2) riparian…
Publication Type: Report
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Model for Modern Fire Management?
Year: 2014
For many thousands of years, aboriginal peoples worldwide used fire to manage landscapes. In NorthAmerica, the frequency and extent of fire (both human caused and natural) were much reduced afterEuropean colonization. Fire exclusion became the policy in the United States for most of the 20thcentury as the country became more settled and industrialized. Past fire exclusion has helped producelandscapes that are highly susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfire. An urgent challengefor land managers today is to reduce fire risk through several means, including prescribed burning,without…
Publication Type: Report
Building trust, establishing credibility, and communicating fire issues with the public
Year: 2014
With more people than ever living in the vicinity of the wildland-urban interface, communicating wildland fire management activities and building trust with the public is paramount for safety. Although the time and resources it takes to build and maintain the public’s trust may seem daunting, it may be one of the most important factors determining the long-term viability of a fire management program. Trust is built over time through personal relationships with citizens and communities and also by demonstrating competence and establishing credibility. When trust and confidence have been…
Publication Type: Report
Trust: A planning guide for wildfire agencies & practitioners
Year: 2014
This planning guide is the outcome of an international collaboration of researchers and practitioners/field managers working in communities at risk of wildfire in three countries. Initially, the team of social scientists from Australia, Canada, and the United States utilized the collective research literature to examine factors that influence stakeholder trust. A working draft of this document was shared with experienced agency personnel and community leaders previous to interactive workshops and field visits in each country. This allowed for deliberations of the essential features of…
Publication Type: Report
Graduate Research Innovation Awards Encourage Young Scientists to Ask Bold Questions
Year: 2014
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), in partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology,offers Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) awards yearly to a handful of top-quality graduatestudents conducting research in fire science. GRIN awards are intended to nurture the next generationof fire and fuels scientists and managers, enhance their professional development,help them become engaged with their community of peers, and equip them to tacklethe fire and fuels management challenges of today and tomorrow.
Publication Type: Report
Wildland fire emissions, carbon, and climate: Modeling fuel consumption
Year: 2014
Fuel consumption specifies the amount of vegetative biomass consumed during wildland fire. It is a two-stage process of pyrolysis and combustion that occurs simultaneously and at different rates depending on the characteristics and condition of the fuel, weather, topography, and in the case of prescribed fire, ignition rate and pattern. Fuel consumption is the basic process that leads to heat absorbing emissions called greenhouse gas and other aerosol emissions that can impact atmospheric and ecosystem processes, carbon stocks, and land surface reflectance. It is a critical requirement for…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing the Compatibility of Fuel Treatments, Wildfire Risk, and Conservation of Northern Spotted Owl Habitats and Populations in the Eastern Cascades: A Multi-Scale Analysis
Year: 2014
National Forests in the dry forest provinces on the east‐side of the Oregon and Washington Cascades have been managed under the guidelines of local Forest Plans and the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), both of which specify large areas of late‐successional reserves (LSRs). In contrast, the recently‐released USDI Fish and Wildlife Service Revised Recovery Plan (RRP) for the Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) calls for development of dynamic and shifting mosaics in the dry forests, and retention of LSRs in moist forests of eastern Cascades of Oregon and Washington, to address NSO habitat and wildfire…
Publication Type: Report
Taming the Software Chaos: True to its Promise, IFTDSS Eases the Burden of Fuels Treatment Planning - and Does a Lot More Besides
Year: 2014
A key problem reported by the fuels treatment planning community is the difficulty and inefficiency of evaluating and then applying many planning tools and applications. Fuels specialists have struggled to find, load, and learn all the different fuels and fire planning models, not to mention the interface of running, adjusting, and inputting data specific to each model without the ability to easily share inputs/outputs between models. The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) was conceived as a way for users to learn one interface, access a variety of data and models…
Publication Type: Report
Trust: A Planning Guide for Wildfire Agencies & Practitioners
Year: 2014
In increasing numbers, agency personnel, interest groups, and residents of at-risk communities are coming together to consider wildfire problems and taking steps to solve them. Particularly with regard to fire management, trust among parties is an essential element to successful local programs (Olsen & Shindler 2010, Lachapelle & McCool 2012). Despite a growing body of research literature on this topic, there are few practical guides for fire managers and practitioners about how to build and evaluate trust amongst stakeholders. Our intention here is to bring clarity to the trust…
Publication Type: Report
Effectiveness of fuel treatments for mitigating wildfire risk and sequestering forest carbon: A case study in the Lake Tahoe Basin
Year: 2014
Fuel-reduction treatments are used extensively to reduce wildfire risk and restore forest diversity and function. In the near future, increasing regulation of carbon (C) emissions may force forest managers to balance the use of fuel treatments for reducing wildfire risk against an alternative goal of C sequestration. The objective of this study was to evaluate how long-term fuel treatments mitigate wildfires and affect forest C. For the Lake Tahoe Basin in the central Sierra Nevada, USA, fuel treatment efficiency was explored with a landscape-scale simulation model, LANDIS-II, using five fuel…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping the daily progression of large wildland fires using MODIS active fire data
Year: 2014
High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires. For each fire, parameters for the kriging model were defined using variogram analysis. The optimal number of observations used to estimate a pixel’s time of burning varied between four and six among the fires studied. The median standard error from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate change tipping points: A point of no return?
Year: 2013
Summer 2012 saw records fall for intensity of drought and number, size, and cost of wildfires in the Central and Western United States, and the climate forecast calls for more of the same in the near and distant future. When wildfire breaks out, emergency responders decide their immediate strategy based on past experience and quick judgment calls. But in the long term, land managers need to plan for a warmer climate on a time scale of decades, or even a century or more, to better reflect the life span of trees and forests. Studies supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) are…
Publication Type: Report
The relationship of post-fire white ash cover to surface fuel consumption
Year: 2013
White ash results from the complete combustion of surface fuels, making it a logically simple retrospective indicator of surface fuel consumption. However, the strength of this relationship has been neither tested nor adequately demonstrated with field measurements. We measured surface fuel loads and cover fractions of white ash and four other surface materials (green vegetation, brown non-photosynthetic vegetation, black char and mineral soil) immediately before and after eight prescribed fires in four disparate fuelbed types: boreal forest floor, mixed conifer woody slash, mixed conifer…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Capturing Fire: RxCadre Takes Fire Measurements to a Whole New Level
Year: 2013
Models of fire behavior and effects do not always make accurate predictions, and there is not enough systematically gathered data to validate them. To help advance fire behavior and fire effects model development, the Joint Fire Science Program is helping fund the RxCADRE, which is made up of scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and several universities who orchestrate and collect data on prescribed burns in the southeastern United States. The RxCADRE-prescribed burns are yielding a comprehensive dataset of fire behavior, fire effects, and smoke chemistry and dynamics, with measurements…
Publication Type: Report
Do carbon offsets work? The role of forest management in greenhouse gas mitigation
Year: 2013
As forest carbon offset projects become more popular, professional foresters are providing their expertise to support them. But when several members of the Society of American Foresters questioned the science and assumptions used to design the projects, the organization decided to convene a task force to examine whether these projects can provide the intended climate benefits. The report details reasons to look for other solutions to greenhouse gas emission challenges. After synthesizing the latest available science, the authors challenge the underlying assumptions used to establish most…
Publication Type: Report
The merits of prescribed fire outweigh potential carbon emission effects
Year: 2013
A White Paper developed by Association for Fire Ecology, International Association of Wildland Fire, Tall Timbers Research Station, and The Nature Conservancy.While North American ecosystems vary widely in their ecology and natural historical fire regimes, they are unified in benefitting from prescribed fire when judiciously applied with the goal of maintaining and restoring native ecosystem composition, structure, and function. On a modern landscape in which historical fire regimes cannot naturally occur due to fuel load build-up and resulting public safety concerns, the cornerstone…
Publication Type: Report
Estimating Consumption and Remaining Carbon in Burned Slash Piles
Year: 2012
Fuel reduction treatments to reduce fire risk have become commonplace in the fire adapted forests of western North America. These treatments generate significant woody debris, or slash, and burning this material in piles is a common and inexpensive approach to reducing fuel loads. Although slash pile burning is a common practice, there is little information on consumption or even a common methodology for estimating consumption. As considerations of carbon storage and emissions from forests increase, better means of quantifying burn piles are necessary. This study uses two methods, sector…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Carbon Outcomes from Fuels Treatment and Bioenergy Production in a Sierra Nevada Forest
Year: 2012
In temperate conifer forests of the Western USA, there is active debate whether fuels reduction treatments and bioenergy production result in decreased carbon emissions and increased carbon sequestration compared to a no-action alternative. To address this debate over net carbon stocks, we performed a carbon life-cycle analysis on data from a fuels reduction treatment in a temperate, dry conifer forest in the northern Sierra Nevada of California, USA. The analysis tracks the net ecosystem carbon balance over 50 years for two scenarios (1) fuels reduction treatment combined with bioenergy…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changes to Dryland Rainfall Result in Rapid Moss Mortality and Altered Soil Fertility
Year: 2012
Arid and semi-arid ecosystems cover ~40% of Earth's terrestrial surface, but we know little about how climate change will affect these widespread landscapes. Like many drylands, the Colorado Plateau in southwestern United States is predicted to experience elevated temperatures and alterations to the timing and amount of annual precipitation. We used a factorial warming and supplemental rainfall experiment on the Colorado Plateau to show that altered precipitation resulted in pronounced mortality of the widespread moss Syntrichia caninervis. Increased frequency of 1.2mm summer rainfall events…
Publication Type: Journal Article