Research Database
Displaying 241 - 260 of 270
A Review of Recent Advances in Risk Analysis for Wildfire Management
Year: 2012
Risk analysis evolved out of the need to make decisions concerning highly stochastic events, and is well suited to analyse the timing, location and potential effects of wildfires. Over the past 10 years, the application of risk analysis to wildland fire management has seen steady growth with new risk-based analytical tools that support a wide range of fire and fuels management planning scales from individual incidents to national, strategic interagency programs. After a brief review of the three components of fire risk – likelihood, intensity and effects – this paper reviews recent advances…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate Change, Forests, Fire, Water, and Fish: Building Resilient Landscapes, Streams, and Managers
Year: 2012
Fire will play an important role in shaping forest and stream ecosystems as the climate changes. Historic observations show increased dryness accompanying more widespread fire and forest die-off. These events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems and sometimes generate stepwise changes in ecosystems. Climate vulnerability assessments need to account for fire in their calculus. The biophysical template of forest and stream ecosystems determines much of their response to fire. This report describes the framework of how fire and climate change work together to affect forest and fish…
Publication Type: Report
Using niche models with climate projections to inform conservation management decisions
Year: 2012
Conservation science strives to inform management decisions. Applying niche models in concert with future climate projections to project species vulnerability to extinction, range size loss, or distribution shifts has emerged as a potentially useful tool for informing resource management decisions. Making climate change niche modeling useful to conservation decisions requires centering studies on the types of decisions that are made regarding the focal taxa of a niche model study. Recent recommendations for climate adaptation strategies suggest four types of decision makers: policy, habitat…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Effects of Forest Fuel-Reduction Treatments in the United States
Year: 2012
The current conditions of many seasonally dry forests in the western and southern United States, especially those that once experienced low- to moderate-intensity fire regimes, leave them uncharacteristically susceptible to high-severity wildfire. Both prescribed fire and its mechanical surrogates are generally successful in meeting short-term fuel-reduction objectives such that treated stands are more resilient to high-intensity wildfire. Most available evidence suggests that these objectives are typically accomplished with few unintended consequences, since most ecosystem components (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Impediments to prescribed fire across agency, landscape and manager: an example from northern California
Year: 2012
Though the need for prescribed fire is widely recognised, its use remains subject to a range of operational and social constraints. Research has focussed on identifying these constraints, yet past efforts have focussed disproportionately on single agencies and geographic regions. We examined constraints on prescribed fire by surveying a wide variety of organisations (including six state and federal agencies and several tribes, non-governmental organisations and timber companies) in northern California, a fire-prone region of the western United States. Across the region, prescribed burning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuels and Fire Behavior Dynamics in Bark Beetle-Attacked Forests in Western North America and Implications for Fire Management
Year: 2012
Declining forest health attributed to associations between extensive bark beetle-caused tree mortality, accumulations of hazardous fuels, wildfire, and climate change have catalyzed changes in forest health and wildfire protection policies of land management agencies. These changes subsequently prompted research to investigate the extent to which bark beetle-altered fuel complexes affect fire behavior. Although not yet rigorously quantified, the results of the investigations, in addition to a growing body of operational experience and research, indicates that predictable changes in surface,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trajectories of change in sagebrush steppe vegetation communities in relation to multiple wildfires
Year: 2012
Repeated perturbations, both biotic and abiotic, can lead to fundamental changes in the nature of ecosystems, including changes in state. Sagebrush steppe communities provide important habitat for wildlife and grazing for livestock. Fire is an integral part of these systems, but there is concern that increased ignition frequencies and invasive species are fundamentally altering them. Despite these issues, the majority of studies of fire effects in systems dominated by Artemisia tridentata wyomingensis have focused on the effects of single burns. The Arid Lands Ecology Reserve (ALE), in south-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest Protection and Forest Harvest as Strategies for Ecological Sustainability and Climate Change Mitigation
Year: 2012
An important consideration in forest management to mitigate climate change is the balance between forest carbon (C) storage and ecological sustainability. We explore the effects of management strategies on tradeoffs between forest C stocks and ecological sustainability under five scenarios, three of which included management and two scenarios which provide baselines emulating the natural forest. Managed forest scenarios were: (a) Protection (PROT), i.e., management by suppression of natural disturbance and harvest exclusion; (b) Harvest at a higher rate removing all sustainably available wood…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Scenarios of land use and land cover change in the conterminous United States: Utilizing the special report on emission scenarios at ecoregional scales
Year: 2012
Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management. This paper describes methods to downscale projections of land-use and land-cover change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Emission Scenarios to ecological regions of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Ecological restoration using EBIPM
Year: 2012
When managing rangeland impacted by weeds, land managers often encounter plant communities where remnant desired vegetation is very scarce. When rangeland is this degraded, simply controlling weeds with the expectation that desired plants will be released from competition and return to dominate the site over time might not be adequate. Introducing propagules (i.e., seeds) of desired species through revegetation might be required. Ecologically Based Invasive Plant Management (EBIPM) serves as a decision-making framework for planning and implementing restoration and revegetation programs. This…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cheating Cheatgrass: New research to combat a wily invasive weed
Year: 2012
Cheatgrass and its cousin, red brome, are exotic annual grasses that have invaded and altered ecosystem dynamics in more than 41 million acres of desert shrublands between the Rockies and the Cascade-Sierra chain. A fungus naturally associated with these Bromus species has been found lethal to the plants’ soil-banked dormant seeds. Supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), researchers Susan Meyer, Phil Allen, and Julie Beckstead cultured this fungus, Pyrenophora semeniperda, in the laboratory and developed an experimental field application that, in some trials, killed all the…
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
Does Wood Bioenergy Increase Carbon Stocks in Forests?
Year: 2012
Wood bioenergy is touted as carbon neutral because biological regrowth recaptures the carbon released in energy production. However, some argue that using wood as an energy feedstock will result in decreased forest stocks and thereby a net reduction of carbon sequestered by forests. Such arguments fail to recognize that increased demand for wood bioenergy could increase stocks of wood, a renewable resource. We address the carbon neutrality question using a dynamic optimization forest management model to examine the effect of increasing or decreasing wood bioenergy demand on an existing forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Placing Forestry in the Assisted Migration Debate
Year: 2012
Assisted migration (AM) is often presented as a strategy to save species that are imminently threatened by rapid climate change. This conception of AM, which has generated considerable controversy, typically proposes the movement of narrowly distributed, threatened species to suitable sites beyond their current range limits. However, existing North American forestry operations present an opportunity to practice AM on a larger scale, across millions of hectares, with a focus on moving populations of widely distributed, nonthreatened tree species within their current range limits. Despite these…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Effects on the Spatial Patterning of Soil Properties in Sagebrush Steppe, USA: A Meta-Analysis
Year: 2012
Understanding effects of changes in ecological disturbance regimes on soil properties, and capacity of soil properties to resist disturbance, is important for assessing ecological condition. In this meta-analysis, we examined the resilience of surface soil properties and their spatial patterning to disturbance by fire in sagebrush steppe of North America – a biome currently experiencing increases in wildfire due to climate change. We reviewed 39 studies that reported on soil properties for sagebrush steppe with distinct microsite (undershrub and interspace) patterning that was or was not…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Short- and Long-term Effects of Fire on Carbon in US Dry Temperate Forest Systems
Year: 2011
Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and in so doing can mitigate the effects of climate change. Fire is a natural disturbance process in many forest systems that releases carbon back to the atmosphere. In dry temperate forests, fires historically burned with greater frequency and lower severity than they do today. Frequent fires consumed fuels on the forest floor and maintained open stand structures. Fire suppression has resulted in increased understory fuel loads and tree density; a change in structure that has caused a shift from low- to high-severity fires. More severe fires,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effectiveness of post-fire seeding at the Fitzner-Eberhardt Arid Land Ecology Reserve, Washington
Year: 2011
In August 2007, the Milepost 17 and Wautoma fires burned a combined total of 77,349 acres (31,302 hectares) of the Fitzner-Eberhardt Arid Land Ecology Reserve (ALE), part of the Hanford Reach National Monument administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Mid-Columbia National Wildlife Refuge. In 2008, the USFWS implemented a series of seeding and herbicide treatments to mitigate potential negative consequences of these fires, including mortality of native vegetation, invasion of Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass), and soil erosion. Treatments included combinations of seeding (drill…
Publication Type: Report
Evaluating Soil Risks Associated With Severe Wildfire and Ground-Based Logging
Year: 2011
Rehabilitation and timber-salvage activities after wildfire require rapid planning and rational decisions. Identifying areas with high risk for erosion and soil productivity losses is important. Moreover, allocation of corrective and mitigative efforts must be rational and prioritized. Our logic-based analysis of forested soil polygons on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest was designed and implemented with the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system to evaluate risks to soil properties and productivity associated with moderate to severe wildfire and unmitigated use of ground-…
Publication Type: Report
Masticating Fuels: Effects on Prescribed Fire Behavior and Subsequent Vegetation Effects
Year: 2009
In fire management, there is an ongoing quest to find cost-effective, ecologically sound, and risk-reducing approaches to restoring dry conifer forests. So far little is known about the effectiveness of using mastication equipment in conjunction with prescribed burning to help meet management and restoration goals. Richy Harrod is the Deputy Fire Management Officer at the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Wenatchee, Washington. He and his colleagues began to address this knowledge gap and found that mastication may be a cost-effective and important tool for managers looking for additional…
Publication Type: Report
Synthesis of Knowledge on the Effects of Fire and Fire Surrogates on Wildlife in U.S. Dry Forests
Year: 2009
Dry forests throughout the United States are fire-dependent ecosystems, and much attention has been given to restoring their ecological function. As such, land managers often are tasked with reintroducing fire via prescribed fire, wildland fire use, and fire-surrogate treatments such as thinning and mastication. During planning, managers frequently are expected to anticipate effects of management actions on wildlife species. This document represents a synthesis of existing knowledge on wildlife responses to fire and fire-surrogate treatments, presented in a useful, management-relevant format…
Publication Type: Report