Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 126
Review of broad-scale drought monitoring of forests: Toward an integrated data mining approach
Year: 2016
Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements. However, derived meteorological indices may not meaningfully capture drought impacts because drought responses can differ substantially among species, sites and regions. Meteorology-based approaches also require the characterization of current…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managed wildfire effects on forest resilience and water in the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2016
Fire suppression in many dry forest types has left a legacy of dense, homogeneous forests. Such landscapes have high water demands and fuel loads, and when burned can result in catastrophically large fires. These characteristics are undesirable in the face of projected warming and drying in the western US. Alternative forest and fire treatments based on managed wildfire—a regime in which fires are allowed to burn naturally and only suppressed under defined management conditions—offer a potential strategy to ameliorate the effects of fire suppression. Understanding the long-term effects of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance
Year: 2015
Prompted by a series of increasingly destructive, expensive, and highly visible wildfire crises in human communities across the globe, a robust body of scholarship has emerged to theorize, conceptualize, and measure community-level resilience to wildfires. To date, however, insufficient consideration has been given to wildfire resilience as a process of adaptive governance mediated by institutions at multiple scales. Here we explore the possibilities for addressing this gap through an analysis of wildfire resilience among wildland-urban interface communities in the western region of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Models predict longer, deeper U.S. droughts
Year: 2015
Severe, decades-long "megadroughts" that hit the southwestern and midwestern United States over the past millennium may be just a preview of droughts to come in the next century as a result of climate change, new research suggests. According to a new analysis of 17 state-of-the-art climate models and reconstructions of historical drought based on 1000 years of tree-ring data, the regions are heading into a period of unprecedented dryness even if CO2 emissions are dramatically reduced. Under a "business-as-usual" emission scenario, there's an 80% likelihood that at least one decades-long…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing adaptive capacity for restoring fire-dependent ecosystems: the Fire Learning Network’s Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges
Year: 2015
Prescribed fire is a critical tool for promoting restoration and increasing resilience in fire-adapted ecosystems, but there are barriers to its use, including a shortage of personnel with adequate ecological knowledge and operational expertise to implement prescribed fire across multijurisdictional landscapes. In the United States, recognized needs for both professional development and increased use of fire are not being met, often because of institutional limitations. The Fire Learning Network has been characterized as a multiscalar, collaborative network that works to enhance the adaptive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Local Ecological Knowledge and Fire Management: What Does the Public Understand?
Year: 2015
As fire management agencies seek to implement more flexible fire management strategies, local understanding and support for these strategies become increasingly important. One issue associated with implementing more flexible fire management strategies is educating local populations about fire management and identifying what local populations know or do not know related to fire management. This study used survey data from three 2010 wildland fires to understand how ecological knowledge and education level affected fire management perception and understanding. Results indicated that increased…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel and vegetation trends after wildfire in treated versus untreated forests
Year: 2015
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to increased interest in managing forests for resiliency to future disturbances. Comparing and contrasting treated versus untreated stands through multiple growing seasons postfire provide an opportunity to understand processes driving responses and can guide management decisions regarding resiliency. In treated and untreated forests, we compared fire effects 2‐10 growing seasons following fire on 3 different fires in New Mexico and Arizona. We estimated understory cover, standing crop, fuel loading, and basal area in (1) lop, pile, burn; (2…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland fire management: insights from a foresight panel
Year: 2015
Wildland fire management faces unprecedented challenges in the 21st century: the increasingly apparent effects of climate change, more people and structures in the wildland-urban interface, growing costs associated with wildfire management, and the rise of high-impact fires, to name a few. Given these significant and growing challenges, conventional fire management approaches are unlikely to be effective in the future. Innovative and forward-looking approaches are needed. This study explored wildland fire management futures by using methods and diverse perspectives from futures research. To…
Publication Type: Report
Fire and fuels
Year: 2014
Recent studies of historical fire regimes indicate that fires occurring prior to Euro-American settlement were characterized by a high degree of spatial complexity that was driven by heterogeneity in vegetation/fuels and topography and influenced by variability in climate, which mediated the timing, effects, and extents of fires over time. Although there are many important lessons to learn from the past, we may not be able to rely completely on past forest conditions to provide us with blueprints for current and future forest management. Rather than attempting to achieve a particular forest…
Publication Type: Report
Correlations between components of the water balance and burned area reveal insights for predicting forest fire area in the southwest United States
Year: 2014
We related measurements of annual burned area in the southwest United States during 1984–2013 to records of climate variability. Within forests, annual burned area correlated at least as strongly with spring–summer vapour pressure deficit (VPD) as with 14 other drought-related metrics, including more complex metrics that explicitly represent fuel moisture. Particularly strong correlations with VPD arise partly because this term dictates the atmospheric moisture demand. Additionally, VPD responds to moisture supply, which is difficult to measure and model regionally due to complex…
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
Recent mountain pine beetle outbreaks, wildfire severity, and postfire tree regeneration in the US Northern Rockies
Year: 2014
Widespread tree mortality caused by outbreaks of native bark beetles (Circulionidae: Scolytinae) in recent decades has raised concern among scientists and forest managers about whether beetle outbreaks fuel more ecologically severe forest fires and impair postfire resilience. To investigate this question, we collected extensive field data following multiple fires that burned subalpine forests in 2011 throughout the Northern Rocky Mountains across a spectrum of prefire beetle outbreak severity, primarily from mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae). We found that recent (2001–2010)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Latent resilience in ponderosa pine forest: effects of resumed frequent fire
Year: 2013
Ecological systems often exhibit resilient states that are maintained through negative feedbacks. In ponderosa pine forests, fire historically represented the negative feedback mechanism that maintained ecosystem resilience; fire exclusion reduced that resilience, predisposing the transition to an alternative ecosystem state upon reintroduction of fire. We evaluated the effects of reintroduced frequent wildfire in unlogged, fire-excluded, ponderosa pine forest in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana, USA. Initial reintroduction of fire in 2003 reduced tree density and consumed surface fuels,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland Fire management: Are actively managed forests more resilient than passively managed forests?
Year: 2013
Large areas of federal lands in the western states are currently at high risk of severe wildfire and have many insect and disease problems, indicating a significant decline in forest health and resilience. Although research studies have not been done that would measure whether actively managed forests are more resilient to wildfires than passively managed forests, results from studies of hazardous fuels treatment effectiveness and the economic benefits from avoided costs of future wildfire suppression due to fuels treatment can be used to support an affirmative reply to the question. If a…
Publication Type: Report
The relationship of large fire occurrence with drought and fire danger indices in the western USA, 1984-2008: the role of temporal scale
Year: 2013
The relationship between large fire occurrence and drought has important implications for fire prediction under current and future climates. This study’s primary objective was to evaluate correlations between drought and fire-danger-rating indices representing short- and long-term drought, to determine which had the strongest relationships with large fire occurrence at the scale of the western United States during the years 1984–2008. We combined 4–8-km gridded drought and fire-danger-rating indices with information on fires greater than 404.7 ha (1000 acres). To account for differences in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring forest resilience: From reference spatial patterns to silvicultural prescriptions and monitoring
Year: 2013
Stand-level spatial pattern influences key aspects of resilience and ecosystem function such as disturbance behavior, regeneration, snow retention, and habitat quality in frequent-fire pine and mixed-conifer forests. Reference sites, from both pre-settlement era reconstructions and contemporary forests with active fire regimes, indicate that frequent-fire forests are complex mosaics of individual trees, tree clumps, and openings. There is a broad scientific consensus that restoration treatments should seek to restore this mosaic pattern in order to restore resilience and maintain ecosystem…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Dry Forest Zone Maps 2013
Year: 2013
The Dry Forest Investment Zone (DFIZ) is a five-year project to address common natural resource-based economic development challenges through increased networking and capacity building at a regional scale. Sustainable Northwest leads this project in partnership with Wallowa Resources in northeastern Oregon, the Watershed Research and Training Center in northern California, and the Ecosystem Workforce Program at the University of Oregon. The central components of the DFIZ strategy are: 1) To build strong local nonprofit organizations and collaborative processes to achieve forest and economic…
Publication Type: Report
Pre-wildfire fuel reduction treatments result in more resilient forest structure a decade after wildfire
Year: 2013
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo–Chediski Fire area. Data from 140 plots on seven paired treated–untreated sites indicated that pre-wildfire treatments reduced fire severity compared with untreated sites. In 2011, coarse woody debris loading (woody material >7.62 cm in diameter) was 257% higher and fine woody debris (woody material <7…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-wildfire fuel reduction treatments result in more resilient forest structure a decade after wildfire
Year: 2013
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire area. Data from 140 plots on seven paired treated-untreated sites indicated that pre-wildfire treatments reduced fire severity compared with untreated sites. In 2011, coarse woody debris loading (woody material.7.62 cm in diameter) was 257% higher and fine woody debris (woody material,7.62 cm)…
Publication Type: Journal Article