Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 158
Post-fire morel (Morchella) mushroom abundance, spatial structure, and harvest sustainability
Year: 2016
Morel mushrooms are globally distributed, socially and economically important reproductive structures produced by fungi of the genus Morchella. Morels are highly prized edible mushrooms and significant harvests are collected throughout their range, especially in the first year after fire, when some morel species fruit prolifically. Few studies have quantified post-fire morel mushroom abundance, despite their widespread human use. The purpose of this study is to provide the first ever estimate of post-fire morel mushroom abundance in Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forest. Specifically, we…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recovery and adaptation after wildfire on the Colorado Front Range (2010-2012)
Year: 2016
Following the loss of homes to wildfire, when risk has been made apparent, homeowners must decide whether to rebuild, and choose materials and vegetation, while local governments guide recovery and rebuilding. As wildfires are smaller and more localised than other disasters, it is unclear if recovery after wildfire results in policy change and adaptation, decreasing assets at risk, or if recovery encourages reinvestment in hazard-prone areas. We studied three wildfires on the Colorado Front Range from2010 to 2012 that each destroyed over 150homes, describing policy response and characterising…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping post-fire habitat characteristics through the fusion of remote sensing tools
Year: 2016
Post-fire snags provide important resources for cavity nesting communities as well as being subject to timber removal through salvage logging practices. Tools that can characterize their distributions along with other features important as wildlife habitat, such as woody shrub cover, would be useful for research and management purposes. Three dimensional lidar data and Landsat time series disturbance products have both shown varying promise in their ability to characterize aspects of dead biomass and understory cover, but studies exploring the combination of the remote sensing datasets…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire logging produces minimal persistent impacts on understory vegetation in northeastern Oregon, USA
Year: 2016
Post-fire forest management commonly requires accepting some negative ecological impacts from management activities in order to achieve management objectives. Managers need to know, however,whether ecological impacts from post-fire management activities are transient or cause long-term ecosystem degradation. We studied the long-term response of understory vegetation to two post-fire loggingtreatments – commercial salvage logging with and without additional fuel reduction logging – on a long-term post-fire logging experiment in northeastern Oregon, USA. We sampled understory plant coverand…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Risk terminology primer: Basic principles and a glossary for the wildland fire management community
Year: 2016
Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application. In response, this General Technical Report provides a set of clear, consistent, understandable, and usable definitions for terms associated with wildland fire risk management. The material presented herein is not brand-new or innovative per se, but rather synthesizes the extant science so that readers can readily make a crosswalk to the professional literature.…
Publication Type: Report
Outcomes of fire research: is science used?
Year: 2016
An assessment of outcomes from research projects funded by the Joint Fire Science Program was conducted to determine whether or not science has been used to inform management and policy decisions and to explore factors that facilitate use of fire science. In a web survey and follow-up phone interviews, I asked boundary spanners and scientists about how findings from a random sample of 48 projects had been applied and factors that acted as barriers or facilitators to science application. In addition, I conducted an investigation of recent planning documents to determine whether products from…
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
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
Temporal fuel dynamics following high-severity fire in dry mixed conifer forests of the eastern Cascades, Oregon, USA
Year: 2015
Fire-resilient landscapes require the recurrent use of fire, but successful use of fire in previously burned areas must account for temporal fuel dynamics. We analysed factors influencing temporal fuel dynamics across a 24-year spatial chronosequence of unmanipulated dry mixed conifer forests following high-severity fire. Duff and litter accumulated as bark sloughed from snags and leaves senesced from recovering vegetation, averaging 14.6 Mg ha–1 and 22.1 Mg ha–1 at our 24-year post-fire site, respectively. 1-h fuels increased linearly, averaging 1.1 Mg ha–1 at our 24-year post-fire site,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire response of riparian vegetation in a heavily browsed environment
Year: 2015
Severe wildfires infrequently occur in large heterogeneous riparian valleys. Riparian areas may affect fire behavior and the pattern of burning due to saturated soils and patchy fuels that may have high moisture content in live and dead stems. We examined the effects of a severe fire on the dominant riparian vegetation: thin-leaf alder, river birch and willow, in a broad riparian valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, USA. We mapped the canopy stem mortality and basal resprouting of 4507 first year post fire and 643 second year post fire individuals that had been the dominant woody…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Five-year legacy of wildfire and salvage logging impacts on nutrient runoff and aquatic plant, invertebrate, and fish productivity
Year: 2014
Ecohydrological linkages between phosphorus (P) production, stream algae, benthic invertebrate, and fish communities were studied for 4 years after severe wildfire in the Rocky Mountains (Alberta, Canada). Mean concentrations of all forms of P (soluble reactive, total dissolved, particulate, and total) were 2 to 13 times greater in burned and post-fire salvage-logged streams than in unburned streams (p < 0.001). Post-disturbance recovery of P was slow with differences in P-discharge relationships still evident 5 years after the fire (p < 0.001). Coupled P and sediment interactions were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Model for Modern Fire Management?
Year: 2014
For many thousands of years, aboriginal peoples worldwide used fire to manage landscapes. In NorthAmerica, the frequency and extent of fire (both human caused and natural) were much reduced afterEuropean colonization. Fire exclusion became the policy in the United States for most of the 20thcentury as the country became more settled and industrialized. Past fire exclusion has helped producelandscapes that are highly susceptible to uncharacteristically severe wildfire. An urgent challengefor land managers today is to reduce fire risk through several means, including prescribed burning,without…
Publication Type: Report
The Effectiveness and Limitations of Fuel Modeling Using the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator
Year: 2014
Fuel treatment effectiveness is often evaluated with fire behavior modeling systems that use fuel models to generate fire behavior outputs. How surface fuels are assigned, either using one of the 53 stylized fuel models or developing custom fuel models, can affect predicted fire behavior. We collected surface and canopy fuels data before and 1, 2, 5, and 8 years after prescribed fire treatments across 10 national forests in California. Two new methods of assigning fuel models within the Fire and FuelsExtension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator were evaluated. Field-based values for dead and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Vegetation Recovery in Slash-Pile Scars Following Conifer Removal in a Grassland-Restoration Experiment
Year: 2014
A principal challenge to restoring tree-invaded grasslands is the removal of woody biomass. Burning of slash piles to reduce woody residues from forest restoration practices generates intense, prolonged heating, with adverse effects on soils and vegetation. In this study, we examined vegetation responses to pile burning following tree removal from conifer-invaded grasslands of the Oregon Cascades. We quantified the longevity and magnitude of fire effects by comparing ground conditions and the cover and richness of plant species in burn-scar centers (higher-intensity fire) and edges (lower-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trust: A planning guide for wildfire agencies & practitioners
Year: 2014
This planning guide is the outcome of an international collaboration of researchers and practitioners/field managers working in communities at risk of wildfire in three countries. Initially, the team of social scientists from Australia, Canada, and the United States utilized the collective research literature to examine factors that influence stakeholder trust. A working draft of this document was shared with experienced agency personnel and community leaders previous to interactive workshops and field visits in each country. This allowed for deliberations of the essential features of…
Publication Type: Report
Fire Learning Network Field Guide
Year: 2014
The Fire Learning Network is part of the “Promoting Ecosystem Resilience and Fire Adapted Communities Together: Collaborative Engagement, Collective Action and CoOwnership of Fire” cooperative agreement among The Nature Conservancy, USDA Forest Service and agencies of the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park Service). In addition to the network of landscape collaboratives, it includes prescribed fire training exchanges and targeted treatments under Scaling-up to Promote Ecosystem Resiliency.
Publication Type: Report
Resprouting Chaparral Dies from Postfire Drought
Year: 2014
California’s chaparral plant community composition can change when fire is followed by intense drought. By measuring postfire population demography coupled with physiological measurements during a severe drought, Pratt et al. were the first to directly link resprout mortality to mechanisms of drought stress and show how chaparral may be affected in the future by the increased frequency of fires combined with drought.
Publication Type: Report
Building trust, establishing credibility, and communicating fire issues with the public
Year: 2014
With more people than ever living in the vicinity of the wildland-urban interface, communicating wildland fire management activities and building trust with the public is paramount for safety. Although the time and resources it takes to build and maintain the public’s trust may seem daunting, it may be one of the most important factors determining the long-term viability of a fire management program. Trust is built over time through personal relationships with citizens and communities and also by demonstrating competence and establishing credibility. When trust and confidence have been…
Publication Type: Report
A synthesis of post-fire Burned Area Reports from 1972 to 2009 for western US Forest Service lands: trends in wildfire characteristics and post-fire stabilisation treatments and expenditures
Year: 2014
Over 1200 post-fire assessment and treatment implementation reports from four decades (1970s–2000s) of western US forest fires have been examined to identify decadal patterns in fire characteristics and the justifications and expenditures for the post-fire treatments. The main trends found were: (1) the area burned by wildfire increased over time and the rate of increase accelerated after 1990; (2) the proportions of burned area assessed as low, moderate and high burn severity likely have remained fairly constant over time, but the use of satellite imagery that began c. 2000 increased the…
Publication Type: Journal Article