Research Database
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
Evidence of fuels management and fire weather influencing fire severity in an extreme fire event
Year: 2017
Following changes in vegetation structure and pattern, along with a changing climate, large wildfire incidence has increased in forests throughout the western U.S. Given this increase there is great interest in whether fuels treatments and previous wildfire can alter fire severity patterns in large wildfires. We assessed the relative influence of previous fuels treatments (including wildfire), fire weather, vegetation and water balance on fire severity in the Rim Fire of 2013. We did this at three different spatial scales to investigate whether the influences on fire severity changed across…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed Fire in Grassland Butterfly Habitat: Targeting Weather and Fuel Conditions to Reduce Soil Temperatures and Burn Severity
Year: 2017
Prescribed burning is a primary tool for habitat restoration and management in fire-adapted grasslands. Concerns about detrimental effects of burning on butterfly populations, however, can inhibit implementation of treatments. Burning in cool and humid conditions is likely to result in lowered soil temperatures and to produce patches of low burn severity, both of which would enhance survival of butterfly larvae at or near the soil surface. In this study, we burned 20 experimental plots in South Puget Sound, Washington, USA, prairies across a range of weather and fuel conditions to address the…
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
Assessing vulnerabilities and adapting to climate change in northwestern U.S. forests
Year: 2017
Multiple climate change vulnerability assessments in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA provide the scientific information needed to begin adaptation in forested landscapes. Adaptation options developed by resource managers in conjunction with these assessments, newly summarized in the Climate Change Adaptation Library of the Western United States, provide an extensive choice of peer-reviewed climate-smart management strategies and tactics. More adaptation options are available for vegetation than for any other resource category, allowing vegetation management to be applied across a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Who among the elderly is most vulnerable to exposure and health risks of PM2.5 from wildfire smoke?
Year: 2017
Wildfires burn over 7 million US acres annually, according to the US Forest Service. Little is known regarding which subpopulations are more vulnerable to health risks from wildfire smoke, including fine particles. We estimated exposure to fine particles specifically from wildfires and associations between wildfire-specific fine particles and respiratory hospital admissions for subpopulations > 65 years in the Western US (2004-2009). Higher fractions of Blacks and people in urban counties and in California are exposed to > 1 smoke wave (high-pollution episodes from wildfire smoke)…
Publication Type: Journal Article