Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 173
Prescribed fire regimes subtly alter ponderosa pine forest plant community structure
Year: 2018
Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century. Despite widespread application in the United States, there is considerable inconsistency and lack of information regarding the extent to which specific outcomes are achieved and under what prescribed fire regimes, particularly in regard to ecological goals related to plant community structure. We quantify differences and patterns in plant functional group abundance, species richness and diversity, and other key forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Expanding Our Understanding of Forest Structural Restoration Needs in the Pacific Northwest
Year: 2018
Ecological departure, or how much landscapes have changed from a natural range of variation (NRV), has become a key metric in forest planning and restoration efforts. In this study we define forest restoration need as the specific change in structural stage abundance necessary to move landscapes into the NRV. While most restoration projects in the forested ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, USA (Oregon and Washington) have embraced this paradigm, our understanding of what treatments to apply where, when, and at what magnitude is evolving and continues to be refined. We build on a body of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Aligning environmental management with ecosystem resilience: a First Foods example from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, USA
Year: 2018
The concept of “reciprocity” between humans and other biota arises from the creation belief of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR). The concept acknowledges a moral and practical obligation for humans and biota to care for and sustain one another, and arises from human gratitude and reverence for the contributions and sacrifices made by other biota to sustain human kind. Reciprocity has become a powerful organizing principle for the CTUIR Department of Natural Resources, fostering continuity across the actions and policies of environmental management programs at…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The full community costs of wildfire
Year: 2018
This report summarizes the accumulated impacts and associated costs of wildfires at the local, state, and federal level. Drawing from existing literature and five case studies—the Hayman (2002), Old, Grand Prix, and Padua Complex (2003), Schultz (2010), Rim (2013), and Loma fires (2016)—we categorize wildfire impacts into short-term expenses including suppression costs spent on firefighting, and long-term damages including costs that accrue in the months and years after a wildfire.
Publication Type: Report
Where wildfires destroy buildings in the US relative to the wildland–urban interface and national fire outreach programs
Year: 2018
Over the past 30 years, the cost of wildfire suppression and homes lost to wildfire in the US have increased dramatically, driven in part by the expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where buildings and wildland vegetation meet. In response, the wildfire management community has devoted substantial effort to better understand where buildings and vegetation co-occur, and to establish outreach programs to reduce wildfire damage to homes. However, the extent to which the location of buildings affected by wildfire overlaps the WUI, and where and when outreach programs are established…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Escaping social-ecological traps through tribal stewardship on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, United States of America
Year: 2018
Tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America (USA) have long-standing relationships to ancestral lands now managed by federal land management agencies. In recent decades, federal and state governments have increasingly recognized tribal rights to resources on public lands and to participate in their management. In support of a new planning initiative to promote sustainable land management, we reviewed scientific publications to examine relationships between tribal social-ecological systems and public lands in the region. We identified key ecocultural resources,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evidence for scale‐dependent topographic controls on wildfire spread
Year: 2018
Wildfire ecosystems are thought to be self‐regulated through pattern–process interactions between ignition frequency and location, and patterns of burned and recovering vegetation. Yet, recent increases in the frequency of large wildfires call into question the application of self‐organization theory to landscape resilience. Topography represents a stable bottom‐up template upon which fire interacts as both a physical and an ecological process. However, it is unclear how topographic control changes geographically and across spatial scales. We analyzed fire perimeter and topography data from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in Temperate Forest Areas: New Measures of Exposure, Sensitivity, and Adaptive Capacity
Year: 2018
Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems. We developed a framework that measures social vulnerability to slow-onset climate-related changes in forest ecosystems. We focused on temperate forests because this biome is expected to experience dramatic change in the coming years, with adverse effects for humans. We advance…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The nature of the beast: examining climate adaptation options in forests with stand‐replacing fire regimes
Year: 2018
Building resilience to natural disturbances is a key to managing forests for adaptation to climate change. To date, most climate adaptation guidance has focused on recommendations for frequent‐fire forests, leaving few published guidelines for forests that naturally experience infrequent, stand‐replacing wildfires. Because most such forests are inherently resilient to stand‐replacing disturbances, and burn severity mosaics are largely indifferent to manipulations of stand structure (i.e., weather‐driven, rather than fuel‐driven fire regimes), we posit that pre‐fire climate adaptation options…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recent post-wildfire salvage logging benefits local and landscape floral and bee communities
Year: 2018
Understanding the implications of shifts in disturbance regimes for plants and pollinators is essential for successful land management. Wildfires are essential natural disturbances that are important drivers of forest biodiversity, and there is often pressure to respond to wildfire with management like post-wildfire logging (i.e., removal of dead trees for economic value immediately following wildfire). We investigated how local floral and bee density, species richness, and community composition and dispersion were influenced by post-wildfire logging, and how these effects differed between an…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human presence diminishes the importance of climate in driving fire activity across the United States
Year: 2017
Growing human and ecological costs due to increasing wildfire are an urgent concern in policy and management, particularly given projections of worsening fire conditions under climate change. Thus, understanding the relationship between climatic variation and fire activity is a critically important scientific question. Different factors limit fire behavior in different places and times, but most fire-climate analyses are conducted across broad spatial extents that mask geographical variation. This could result in overly broad or inappropriate management and policy decisions that neglect to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bridging the divide between fire safety research and fighting fire safely: how do we convey research innovation to contribute more effectively to wildland firefighter safety?
Year: 2017
Creating a safe workplace for wildland firefighters has long been at the centre of discussion for researchers and practitioners. The goal of wildland fire safety research has been to protect operational firefighters, yet its contributions often fall short of potential because much is getting lost in the translation of peer-reviewed results to potential and intended users. When information that could enhance safety is not adopted by individuals, the potential to improve safety – to decipher the wildland fire physical or social environment and to recognise hazards – is lost. We use firefighter…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions of predominant insects and diseases with climate change in Douglas-fir forests of western Oregon and Washington, U.S.A.
Year: 2017
Forest disturbance regimes are beginning to show evidence of climate-mediated changes, such as increasing severity of droughts and insect outbreaks. We review the major insects and pathogens affecting the disturbance regime for coastal Douglas-fir forests in western Oregon and Washington State, USA, and ask how future climate changes may influence their role in disturbance ecology. Although the physiological constraints of light, temperature, and moisture largely control tree growth, episodic and chronic disturbances interacting with biological factors have substantial impacts on the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The effects of thinning and burning on understory vegetation in North America: A meta-analysis
Year: 2017
Management in fire-prone ecosystems relies widely upon application of prescribed fire and/or fire-surrogate (e.g., forest thinning) treatments to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function. The literature suggests fire and mechanical treatments proved more variable in their effects on understory vegetation as compared to their effects on stand structure. The growing body of work comparing fire and thinning effects on understory vegetation offers an opportunity to increase the generality of conclusions through meta-analysis. We conducted a meta-analysis to determine if there were consistent…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Impacts of lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium americanum) infestation on stand structure and fuel load in lodgepole pine dominated forests in central Colorado
Year: 2017
Parasitic plants are capable of causing substantial alterations to plant communities through impacts on individual host plants. Lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe is an important parasite in forests of the western USA that causes reductions to productivity and is thought to alter wildland fuel complexes. These impacts are hypothesized to vary with infestation severity. To test this, we used a linear mixed modeling approach to evaluate the relationship between dwarf mistletoe infestation severity and parameters representing stand structure and surface and canopy fuels in infested lodgepole pine…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Towards improving wildland firefighter situational awareness through daily fire behaviour risk assessments in the US Northern Rockies and Northern Great Basin
Year: 2017
Wildland firefighters must assess potential fire behaviour in order to develop appropriate strategies and tactics that will safely meet objectives. Fire danger indices integrate surface weather conditions to quantify potential variations in fire spread rates and intensities and therefore should closely relate to observed fire behaviour. These indices could better inform fire management decisions if they were linked directly to observed fire behaviour. Here, we present a simple framework for relating fire danger indices to observed categorical wildland fire behaviour. Ordinal logistic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fires following Bark Beetles: Factors Controlling Severity and Disturbance Interactions in Ponderosa Pine
Year: 2017
Previous studies have suggested that bark beetles and fires can be interacting disturbances, whereby bark beetle–caused tree mortality can alter the risk and severity of subsequent wildland fires. However, there remains considerable uncertainty around the type and magnitude of the interaction between fires following bark beetle attacks, especially in drier forest types such as those dominated by ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson). We used a full factorial design across a range of factors thought to control bark beetle−fire interactions, including the temporal phase of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and dwarf mistletoe (Viscaceae: Arceuthobium species) in western North America: contrasting Arceuthobium tsugense and Arceuthobium americanum
Year: 2017
Dwarf mistletoes (Viscaceae: Arceuthobium spp.) and fire interact in important ways in the coniferous forests of western North America. Fire directly affects dwarf mistletoes by killing the host, host branch, or heating/smoking the aerial shoots and fruits. Fire is a primary determinant of dwarf mistletoe distribution on the landscape, and time since fire controls many aspects of dwarf mistletoe epidemiology. Conversely, dwarf mistletoes can influence fire by causing changes in forest composition, structure, and fuels. Prescribed fire is important for management of dwarf mistletoes, while…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Disturbance, tree mortality, and implications for contemporary regional forest change in the Pacific Northwest
Year: 2016
Tree mortality is an important demographic process and primary driver of forest dynamics, yet there are relatively few plot-based studies that explicitly quantify mortality and compare the relative contribution of endogenous and exogenous disturbances at regional scales. We used repeated observations on 289,390 trees in 3673 1 ha plots on U.S. Forest Service lands in Oregon and Washington to compare distributions of mortality rates among natural disturbances and vegetation zones from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, a period characterized by drought, insect outbreaks, and large wildfires.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Facilitating knowledge transfer between researchers and wildfire practitioners about trust: An international case study
Year: 2016
The importance of knowledge transfer between researchers, policy makers and practitioners is widely recognized. However, barriers to knowledge transfer can make it difficult for practitioners to apply the results of scientific research. This paper describes a project that addressed barriers to knowledge transfer by involving wildfire management practitioners from three countries in developing a trust planning guide. The guide provides information about trust, factors that influence trust and actions that can be taken to build trust in the context of wildfire management. The researchers…
Publication Type: Journal Article