Research Database
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10
Can biochar link forest restoration with commercial agriculture?
Year: 2019
The commercial use of low-value forest-origin biomass has long been considered for its potential to offset the cost of reducing wildfire hazard. The production of biochar simultaneously consumes low-value forest biomass and produces stable charcoal that, when applied to dryland agricultural soils, can increase water holding capacity and crop yield. In this way the production of forest-origin biochar has the potential to promote forest restoration, foster forest-related employment, increase agricultural competitiveness, and sequester carbon. Biochar offers the greatest opportunity where…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tamm Review: Reforestation for resilience in dry western U.S. forests
Year: 2019
The increasing frequency and severity of fire and drought events have negatively impacted the capacity and success of reforestation efforts in many dry, western U.S. forests. Challenges to reforestation include the cost and safety concerns of replanting large areas of standing dead trees, and high seedling and sapling mortality rates due to water stress, competing vegetation, and repeat fires that burn young plantations. Standard reforestation practices have emphasized establishing dense conifer cover with gridded planting, sometimes called 'pines in lines', followed by shrub control and pre-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire management affects species composition but not Douglas-fir regeneration in the Klamath Mountains
Year: 2019
Ensuring adequate conifer regeneration after high severity wildfires is a common objective for ecologists and forest managers. In the Klamath region of Oregon and California, a global hotspot of botanical biodiversity, concerns over regeneration have led to post-fire management on many sites, which involves salvage logging followed by site preparation, conifer planting, and manual shrub release. To quantify the impacts of post-fire management, we sampled 62 field sites that burned at high severity nearly 20 years ago in the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountain bioregion, stratifying by management and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial and temporal assessment of responder exposure to snag hazards in post-fire environments
Year: 2019
Researchers and managers increasingly recognize enterprise risk management as critical to addressing contemporary fire management challenges. Quantitative wildfire risk assessments contribute by parsing and mapping potentially contradictory positive and negative fire effects. However, these assessments disregard risks to fire responders because they only address social and ecological resources and assets. In this study, we begin to overcome this deficiency by using a novel modeling approach that integrates remote sensing, field inventories, imputation-based vegetation modeling, and empirical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Integrating Subjective and Objective Dimensions of Resilience in Fire-Prone Landscapes
Year: 2019
Resilience has become a common goal for science-based natural resource management, particularly in the context of changing climate and disturbance regimes. Integrating varying perspectives and definitions of resilience is a complex and often unrecognized challenge to applying resilience concepts to social–ecological systems (SESs) management. Using wildfire as an example, we develop a framework to expose and separate two important dimensions of resilience: the inherent properties that maintain structure, function, or states of an SES and the human perceptions of desirable or valued components…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Near-future forest vulnerability to drought and fire varies across the western United States
Year: 2019
Recent prolonged droughts and catastrophic wildfires in the western United States have raised concerns about the potential for forest mortality to impact forest structure, forest ecosystem services, and the economic vitality of communities in the coming decades. We used the Community Land Model (CLM) to determine forest vulnerability to mortality from drought and fire by the year 2049. We modified CLM to represent 13 major forest types in the western United States and ran simulations at a 4‐km grid resolution, driven with climate projections from two general circulation models under one…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate, Environment, and Disturbance History Govern Resilience of Western North American Forests
Year: 2019
Before the advent of intensive forest management and fire suppression, western North American forests exhibited a naturally occurring resistance and resilience to wildfires and other disturbances. Resilience, which encompasses resistance, reflects the amount of disruption an ecosystem can withstand before its structure or organization qualitatively shift to a different basin of attraction. In fire-maintained forests, resilience to disturbance events arose primarily from vegetation pattern-disturbance process interactions at several levels of organization. Using evidence from 15 ecoregions,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Out of the Ashes: Ecological Resilience to Extreme Wildfire, Prescribed Burns, and Indigenous Burning in Ecosystems
Year: 2019
Until Euro-American colonization, Indigenous people used fire to modify eco-cultural systems, developing robust Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Since 1980, wildfire activity has increased due to fire suppression and climate change. In 2017, in Waterton Lakes National Park, AB, the Kenow wildfire burned 19,303 ha, exhibiting extreme fire behavior. It affected forests and the Eskerine Complex, a native-grass prairie treated with prescribed burns since 2006 to reduce aspen (Populus tremuloides) encroachment linked to fire suppression and bison (Bison bison bison) extirpation. One year…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rethinking resilience to wildfire
Year: 2019
Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming increasingly common worldwide, and large wildfires are having extraordinary impacts on people and property, despite years of investments to support social–ecological resilience to wildfires. This has prompted new calls for land management and policy reforms as current land and fire management approaches have been unable to effectively respond to the rapid changes in climate and development patterns that strongly control fire behaviour and continue to exacerbate the risks and hazards to human communities. Promoting social–ecological resilience in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Influence of fire refugia spatial pattern on post-fire forest recovery in Oregon’s Blue Mountains
Year: 2019
Context Fire regimes in many dry forests of western North America are substantially different from historical conditions, and there is concern about the ability of these forests to recover following severe wildfire. Fire refugia, unburned or low-severity burned patches where trees survived fire, may serve as essential propagule sources that enable forest regeneration. Objectives To quantify the influence of fire refugia spatial pattern and other biophysical factors on the process of post-fire tree regeneration; in particular examining both the proximity and density of surrounding refugia to…
Publication Type: Journal Article