Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 105
Forest disturbance across the conterminous United States from 1985-2012: The emerging dominance of forest decline
Year: 2016
Evidence of shifting dominance among major forest disturbance agent classes regionally to globally has been emerging in the literature. For example, climate-related stress and secondary stressors on forests (e.g., insect and disease, fire) have dramatically increased since the turn of the century globally, while harvest rates in the western US and elsewhere have declined. For shifts to be quantified, accurate historical forest disturbance estimates are required as a baseline for examining current trends. We report annual disturbance rates (with uncertainties) in the aggregate and by major…
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
Fire severity and cumulative disturbance effects in the post-mountain pine beetle lodgepole pine forests of the Pole Creek Fire
Year: 2016
Recent large scale mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, MPB) outbreaks have created concern regarding increased fuel loadings and exacerbated fire behavior and have prompted a desire to understand the effects of sequential disturbances on the landscape. However, previous research has focused on quantifying fuel loadings and using operational fire behavior models, rather than direct field measurements, to understand changes in fire severity following MPB. The 2012 Pole Creek Fire in central Oregon partially occurred in gray stage (8–15 years post-MPB epidemic) lodgepole pine…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changing disturbance regimes, ecological memory, and forest resilience
Year: 2016
Ecological memory is central to how ecosystems respond to disturbance and is maintained by two types of legacies – information and material. Species life-history traits represent an adaptive response to disturbance and are an information legacy; in contrast, the abiotic and biotic structures (such as seeds or nutrients) produced by single disturbance events are material legacies. Disturbance characteristics that support or maintain these legacies enhance ecological resilience and maintain a “safe operating space” for ecosystem recovery. However, legacies can be lost or diminished as…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Strengthening syntheses on fire: increasing their usefulness for managers
Year: 2015
A synthesis for fire managers summarizes and interprets a body of information, presents its meaning in an objective, unbiased way, and describes its implications for decisionmakers. Following are suggestions for ways to strengthen syntheses on fire and on other natural resource issues: Include managers, scientists, and science delivery specialists in planning, developing, and delivering syntheses; If a synthesis has unique regional components, include someone from each region in the planning team and consider these needs in writing and packaging; Use managers as authors, co-authors, or…
Publication Type: Report
Tree mortality from drought, insects, and their interactions in a changing climate
Year: 2015
Climate change is expected to drive increased tree mortality through drought, heat stress, and insect attacks, with manifold impacts on forest ecosystems. Yet, climate-induced tree mortality and biotic disturbance agents are largely absent from process-based ecosystem models. Using data sets from the western USA and associated studies, we present a framework for determining the relative contribution of drought stress, insect attack, and their interactions, which is critical for modeling mortality in future climates. We outline a simple approach that identifies the mechanisms associated with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Native and exotic plant species respond differently to wildfire and prescribed fire as revealed by meta-analysis
Year: 2015
Questions: Wildfire is a natural disturbance that shapes vegetation characteristics worldwide, while prescribed fire is increasingly used to modify vegetation composition and structure. Due to invasion of many ecosystems by exotic species, a concern of land managers is whether wildfire and prescribed fire alter plant communities in favour of exotics. We assessed the global literature describing community-level responses of native and exotic species groups to wildfire and prescribed fire and characterized the geographic and temporal scope of the data to inform research needs. Location:…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions among spruce beetle disturbance, climate change and forest dynamics captured by a forest landscape model
Year: 2015
The risk of bark beetle outbreaks is widely predicted to increase because of a warming climate that accelerates temperature-driven beetle population growth and drought stress that impairs host tree defenses. However, few if any studies have explicitly evaluated climatically enhanced beetle population dynamics in relation to climate-driven changes in forest composition and structure that may alter forest suitability for beetle infestation. We synthesized current understanding of the interactions among climate, spruce beetles (Dendroctonus rufipennis) and forest dynamics to parameterize and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Community wildfire preparedness: a global state-of-the-knowledge summary of social science research
Year: 2015
This article builds on findings from a synthesis of fire social science research that was published from 2000 to 2010 to understand what has been learned more recently about public response to wildfires. Two notable changes were immediately noted in the fairly substantial number of articles published between 2011 and 2014. First, while over 90% of the articles found in the initial synthesis were US-based studies, roughly half of the articles published since 2010 have been conducted outside the USA, the majority from Australia. Second, while the primary focus of earlier studies was on pre-fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest disturbance accelerates thermophilization of understory plant communities
Year: 2015
1. Climate change is likely to shift plant communities towards species from warmer regions, a processtermed ‘thermophilization’. In forests, canopy disturbances such as fire may hasten this processby increasing temperature and moisture stress in the understory, yet little is known about the mechanismsthat might drive such shifts, or the consequences of these processes for plant diversity.2. We sampled understory vegetation across a gradient of disturbance severity from a large-scalenatural experiment created by the factorial combination of forest thinning and wildfire in California.Using…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Representing climate, disturbance, and vegetation interactions in landscape models
Year: 2015
The prospect of rapidly changing climates over the next century calls for methods to predict their effects on myriad, interactive ecosystem processes. Spatially explicit models that simulate ecosystem dynamics at fine (plant, stand) to coarse (regional, global) scales are indispensable tools for meeting this challenge under a variety of possible futures. A special class of these models, called landscape models (LMs), simulates dynamics at intermediate scales where many critical ecosystem processes interact. The complicated dependencies among climate, disturbance, and vegetation present a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland fire deficit and surplus in the western United States, 1984-2012
Year: 2015
Wildland fire is an important disturbance agent in the western US and globally. However, the natural role of fire has been disrupted in many regions due to the influence of human activities, which have the potential to either exclude or promote fire, resulting in a "fire deficit" or "fire surplus", respectively. In this study, we developed a model of expected area burned for the western US as a function of climate from 1984 to 2012. We then quantified departures from expected area burned to identify geographic regions with fire deficit or surplus. We developed our model of area burned as a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel treatments and landform modify landscape patterns of burn severity in an extreme fire event
Year: 2014
Under a rapidly warming climate, a critical management issue in semiarid forests of western North America is how to increase forest resilience to wildfire. We evaluated relationships between fuel reduction treatments and burn severity in the 2006 Tripod Complex fires, which burned over 70 000 ha of mixed-conifer forests in the North Cascades range of Washington State and involved 387 past harvest and fuel treatment units. A secondary objective was to investigate other drivers of burn severity including landform, weather, vegetation characteristics, and a recent mountain pine beetle outbreak.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Is fire exclusion in mountain big sagebrush communities prudent? Soil nutrient, plant diversity and arthropod response to burning
Year: 2014
Fire has largely been excluded from many mountain big sagebrush communities. Managers are reluctant to reintroduce fire, especially in communities without significant conifer encroachment, because of the decline in sagebrush-associated wildlife. Given this management direction, a better understanding of fire exclusion and burning effects is needed. We compared burned to unburned plots at six sites in Oregon. Soil nutrient availability generally increased with burning. Plant diversity increased with burning in the first post-burn year, but decreased by the third post-burn year. Burning altered…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
The influence of experimental wind disturbance on forest fuels and fire characteristics
Year: 2014
Current theory in disturbance ecology predicts that extreme disturbances in rapid succession can lead to dramatic changes in species composition or ecosystem processes due to interactions among disturbances. However, the extent to which less catastrophic, yet chronic, disturbances such as wind damage and fire interact is not well studied. In this study, we simulated wind-caused gaps in a Pinus taeda forest in the Piedmont of north-central Georgia using static winching of trees to examine how wind damage may alter fuel characteristics and the behavior of subsequent prescribed fire. We found…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Ecology and Management of Moist Mixed-Conifer Forests in Eastern Oregon and Washington: a Synthesis of the Relevant Biophysical Science and Implications for Future Land Management
Year: 2014
Land managers in the Pacific Northwest have reported a need for updated scientific information on the ecology and management of mixed-conifer forests east of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington. Of particular concern are the moist mixed-conifer forests, which have become drought-stressed and vulnerable to high-severity fire after decades of human disturbances and climate warming. This synthesis responds to this need. We present a compilation of existing research across multiple natural resource issues, including disturbance regimes, the legacy effects of past management actions,…
Publication Type: Report
Catchment-scale stream temperature response to land disturbance by wildfire governed by surface–subsurface energy exchange and atmospheric controls
Year: 2014
In 2003, the Lost Creek wildfire severely burned 21,000 hectares of forest on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Seven headwater catchments with varying levels of disturbance (burned, post-fire salvage logged, and unburned) were instrumented as part of the Southern Rockies Watershed Project to measure streamflow, stream temperature, and meteorological conditions. From 2004 to 2010 mean annual stream temperature (Ts) was elevated 0.8–2.1 [1]C in the burned and post-fire salvage logged streams compared to the unburned streams. Mean daily maximum Ts was 1.0–3.0 [1]C warmer and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Understanding evacuation preferences and wildfire mitigations among Northwest Montana residents
Year: 2014
There is currently insufficient information in the United States about residents’ planned evacuation actions during wildfire events, including any intent to remain at or near home during fire events. This is incompatible with growing evidence that select populations at risk from wildfire are considering alternatives to evacuation. This study explores the evacuation preferences of wildland–urban interface residents in Flathead County, Montana, USA. We compare the performance of wildfire mitigation and fuel reduction actions across groups of residents with different primary evacuation…
Publication Type: Journal Article