Research Database
Displaying 241 - 254 of 254
Fire as a restoration tool: A decision framework for predicting the control or enhancement of plants using fire
Year: 2010
Wildfires change plant communities by reducing dominance of some species while enhancing the abundance of others. Detailed habitat-specific models have been developed to predict plant responses to fire, but these models generally ignore the breadth of fire regime characteristics that can influence plant survival such as the degree and duration of exposure to lethal temperatures. We provide a decision framework that integrates fire regime components, plant growth form, and survival attributes to predict how plants will respond to fires and how fires can be prescribed to enhance the likelihood…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Introducing FuelCalc: A New Tool that Helps Turn Static Inventory Data into Actionable Information
Year: 2010
Fuel and fire managers perform fuel treatments to manage and restore ecosystems and protect resources. In order to plan effective fuel treatments that accomplish objectives, managers need to analyze fuel conditions and document the expected fire behavior and fire effects both before and after fuel treatment. To help accomplish these goals, a new software tool named FuelCalc was created. FuelCalc facilitates use of a wide range of inventory data and fuel characteristics to help calculate fuel quantities and qualities to estimate potential fire behavior, fire effects, and smoke production. By…
Publication Type: Report
Wildfire Risk Management on a Landscape with Public and Private Ownership: Who Pays for Protection?
Year: 2010
Wildfire, like many natural hazards, affects large landscapes with many landowners and the risk individual owners face depends on both individual and collective protective actions. In this study, we develop a spatially explicit game theoretic model to examine the strategic interaction between landowners’ hazard mitigation decisions on a landscape with public and private ownership. We find that in areas where ownership is mixed, the private landowner performs too little fuel treatment as they ‘‘free ride’’—capture benefits without incurring the costs—on public protection, while areas with…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed fires as ecological surrogates for wildfires: A stream and riparian perspective
Year: 2010
Forest managers use prescribed fire to reduce wildfire risk and to provide resource benefits, yet little information is available on whether prescribed fires can function as ecological surrogates for wildfire in fire-prone landscapes. Information on impacts and benefits of this management tool on stream and riparian ecosystems is particularly lacking. We used a beyond-BACI (Before, After, Control, Impact) design to investigate the effects of a prescribed fire on a stream ecosystem and compared these findings to similar data collected after wildfire. For 3 years after prescribed fire treatment…
Publication Type: Journal Article
ArcFuels: Integrating Wildfire Models and Risk Analysis into Landscape Fuels Management
Year: 2009
That risk from wildfire continues to grow across the United States is not a new problem. Managing forest fuels in the real world—such as thinning and burning prescriptively—to reduce fuel loads have been used effectively to reduce the risk of severe wildfire. These actions have been helped by a variety of software tools that assist managers in planning and evaluating fuel treatments to ensure they are cost effective in terms of impeding the growth of future large, severe wildfires. While many landscape planning tools do a fine job within the scope of their capabilities, the process of fine…
Publication Type: Report
Assessing fuel treatment effectiveness using satellite imagery and spatial statistics
Year: 2009
Understanding the influences of forest management practices on wildfire severity is critical in fire-prone ecosystems of the western United States. Newly available geospatial data sets characterizing vegetation, fuels, topography, and burn severity offer new opportunities for studying fuel treatment effectiveness at regional to national scales. In this study, we used ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression and sequential autoregression (SAR) to analyze fuel treatment effects on burn severity for three recent wildfires: the Camp 32 fire in western Montana, the School fire in southeastern…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The evaluation of meta-analysis techniques for quantifying prescribed fire effects on fuel loadings
Year: 2009
Models and effect-size metrics for meta-analysis were compared in four separate meta-analyses quantifying surface fuels after prescribed fires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.) forests of the Western United States. An aggregated data set was compiled from 8 published reports that contained data from 65 fire treatment units. Downed woody and organic fuels were partitioned into five classes, and four meta-analyses were performed on each in a 2 by 2 factorial combination of fixed-effects vs. mixed-effects models with a difference-based metric (Hedges’ d) vs. a ratio-based…
Publication Type: Report
FOFEM: The First-Order Fire Effects Model Adapts to the 21st Century
Year: 2009
Technology is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the efficiency and effectiveness of fire management. The First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM) is a widely used computer application that predicts the immediate or ‘first-order’ effects of fire: fuel consumption, tree mortality, emissions, and soil heating. FOFEM’s simple operation and comprehensive features have made it a workhorse for fire and resource professionals who need to be able to predict, assess and plan for fire’s effects. Over the last decade FOFEM has undergone several upgrades as developers continue to improve function and…
Publication Type: Report
Consume 3.0 -- A Software Tool for Computing Fuel Consumption
Year: 2009
Knowing when, where and how fire should be applied is critical for land managers planning to use fire prescriptively for land management goals, or allowing fires ignited naturally to burn. Myriad variables need to be taken into consideration to determine how fire will consume different fuels. Consume, version 3.0 is a user-friendly software that incorporates the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) to predict fuel consumption, pollutant emissions, and heat release. A flexible tool, Consume 3.0 makes these calculations based on fuel loadings, fuel moisture and other environmental…
Publication Type: Report
Ecological Effects of Prescribed Fire Season: A Literature Review and Synthesis for Managers
Year: 2009
Prescribed burning may be conducted at times of the year when fires were infrequent historically, leading to concerns about potential adverse effects on vegetation and wildlife. Historical and prescribed fire regimes for different regions in the continental United States were compared and literature on season of prescribed burning synthesized. In regions and vegetation types where considerable differences in fuel consumption exist among burning seasons, the effects of prescribed fire season appears, for many ecological variables, to be driven more by fire-intensity differences among seasons…
Publication Type: Report
The Ecological Importance of Severe Wildfires: Some Like it Hot
Year: 2008
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically. It remains unclear, however, how far these generalizations can be extrapolated in time and space, and how well they apply to the more mesic ponderosa pine systems and to other forest systems within the western United States.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Lessons of the Hayman fire: weeds, woodpeckers and fire severity
Year: 2008
This project took advantage of pre-fire data gathered within the perimeter of Colorado’s 2002 Hayman Fire. Researchers studied the unique fire regime of Front Range ponderosa pine forests, and fire effects on understory-plant communities and American Three-toed Woodpeckers. Results confirmed that historically, the diverse structure of these forests was maintained by a mixed-severity fire regime that included large areas of severe fire. In addition, researchers found that much of the burn meets habitat requirements for American Three-toed Woodpeckers, and that understory plant species that…
Publication Type: Report
Behavior Modification: Tempering Fire at the Landscape Level
Year: 2008
With a history of management choices that have suppressed fire in the West, ecosystems in which fire would play a vital role have developed tremendous fuel loads. As a result, conditions are prime for fires to grow large, escape attack measures, and become catastrophic conflagrations that damage watersheds, forest resources, and homes. With a quiver of treatment options, land managers have successfully used prescribed burning and thinning to modify landscapes at the stand level. But planning treatments to modify fuel build up on a patch of forest is vastly different than planning treatments…
Publication Type: Report
Wildlife and invertebrate response to fuel reduction treatments in dry coniferous forests of western US
Year: 2006
This paper synthesizes available information on the effects of hazardous fuel reduction treatments on terrestrial wildlife and invertebrates in dry coniferous forest types in the West. We focused on thinning and/or prescribed fire studies in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and dry-type Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii ), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), and mixed coniferous forests. Overall, there are tremendous gaps in information needed to evaluate the effects of fuel reduction on the majority of species found in our focal area. Differences among studies in location, fuel treatment type…
Publication Type: Report