Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 135
Living on a flammable planet: interdisciplinary, cross-scalar and varied cultural lessons, prospects and challenges
Year: 2016
Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse, international and interdisciplinary expertise, we outline generalizable properties of fire-adaptive communities in varied settings where cultural knowledge of fire is rich and diverse. At the national scale, we discussed policy and management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Health and Environmental Impacts of Smoke from Vegetation Fires: A Review
Year: 2016
Smoke exposure is often an inevitable side effect of open vegetation fires (both planned and wild) and is an important public health concern. The objective of this paper is to summarize state-of-the-art knowledge on health and environmental impacts of smoke from vegetation fires, to identify research gaps, and to provide needed information to researchers, land managers, policymakers, health care workers, and the general public. The main components of vegetation fire smoke and their characterizations are identified and evaluated. Concentrations, emission ratios, and emission factors of smoke…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring forest structure and process stabilizes forest carbon in wildfire-prone southwestern ponderosa pine forests
Year: 2016
Changing climate and a legacy of fire-exclusion have increased the probability of high-severity wildfire, leading to an increased risk of forest carbon loss in ponderosa pine forests in the southwestern USA. Efforts to reduce high-severity fire risk through forest thinning and prescribed burning require both the removal and emission of carbon from these forests, and any potential carbon benefits from treatment may depend on the occurrence of wildfire. We sought to determine how forest treatments alter the effects of stochastic wildfire events on the forest carbon balance. We modeled three…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating Prescribed Fire Effectiveness Using Permanent Monitoring Plot Data: A Case Study
Year: 2016
Since Euro-American settlement, ponderosa pine forests throughout the western United States have shifted from high fire frequency and open canopy savanna forests to infrequent fire and dense, closed canopy forests. Managers at Zion National Park, USA, reintroduced fire to counteract these changes and decrease the potential for high-severity fires. We analyzed existing permanent monitoring plot data collected between 1995 and 2010 to assess achievement of management objectives related to prescribed fire in ponderosa pine forests. Following first entry fire, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa C.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire smoke and public health risk
Year: 2015
Wildfire activity is predicted to increase with global climate change, resulting in longer fire seasons and larger areas burned. The emissions from fires are highly variable owing to differences in fuel, burning conditions and other external environmental factors. The smoke that is generated can impact human populations spread over vast geographical areas. Wildfire smoke is a complex mixture of pollutants that can undergo physical and chemical transformation processes during transport and can have major impacts on air quality and public health. This review looks at the main features of smoke…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire and the Future of Water Supply
Year: 2014
In many parts of the world, forests provide high quality water for domestic, agricultural, industrial, and ecological needs, with water supplies in those regions inextricably linked to forest health. Wildfires have the potential to have devastating effects on aquatic ecosystems and community drinking water supply through impacts on water quantity and quality. In recent decades, a combination of fuel load accumulation, climate change, extensive droughts, and increased human presence in forests have resulted in increases in area burned and wildfire severity—a trend predicted to continue. Thus,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Smoke management of wildfire and prescribed fire: understanding public preferences and trade-offs
Year: 2014
Smoke from forest fires is a serious and increasing land management concern. However, a paucity of information exists that is specific to public perceptions of smoke. This study used conjoint analysis, a multivariate technique, to evaluate how four situational factors (i.e., smoke origin, smoke duration, health impact, and advanced warning) influence public tolerance of smoke in the northern Rocky Mountains and south-central United States. Separate analyses were performed for subgroups, based on community type, level of fire preparedness, demographics, and smoke experience, to explore…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The climate-wildfire-air quality system: interactions and feedbacks across spatial and temporal scales
Year: 2014
Future climate change and its effects on social and ecological systems present challenges for preserving valued ecosystem services, including local and regional air quality. Wildfire is a major source of air-quality impact in some locations, and a substantial contributor to pollutants of concern, including nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, which are regulated to protect public and environmental health. Since climate change is expected to increase total area burned by wildfire and wildfires affect air quality, which is regulated, there is a need to define and study climate, wildfire, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mixed-severity fire in lodgepole-dominated forests: Are historical regimes sustainable on Oregon's Pumice Plateau, USA?
Year: 2014
In parts of central Oregon, coarse-textured pumice substrates limit forest composition to low-density lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Douglas ex Loudon var. latifolia Engelm. ex S. Watson) with scattered ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson) and a shrub understory dominated by antelope bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata (Pursh) DC.). We reconstructed the historical fire regime from tree rings and simulated fire behavior over 783 hectares of this forest type. For centuries (1650-1900), extensive mixed-severity fires occurred every 26 to 82 years, creating a multi-aged forest and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Managing burned landscapes: Evaluating future management strategies for resilient forests under a warming climate
Year: 2014
Climate change effects on forested ecosystems worldwide include increases in drought-related mortality, changes to disturbance regimes and shifts in species distributions. Such climate-induced changes will alter the outcomes of current management strategies, complicating the selection of appropriate strategies to promote forest resilience. We modelled forest growth in ponderosa pine forests that burned in Arizona’s 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire using the Forest Vegetation Simulator Climate Extension, where initial stand structures were defined by pre-fire treatment and fire severity. Under extreme…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring and Managing Mixed Conifer Forests in the PNW
Year: 2013
Many collaborative groups working across the eastside of Oregon and Washington have developed good working agreements on treatments appropriate for ponderosa pine forest types. These groups are actively supporting and helping to develop projects that will meet ecological objectives for dry forests while generating jobs and economic activity in local communities. Currently, there is less agreement on how to approach restoration and management of mixed-conifer forests, in large part because there does not appear to be a comparable scientific consensus as that which exists for ponderosa pine…
Publication Type: Conference Proceedings
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
Conifer regeneration following stand-replacing wildfires varies along an elevation gradient in a ponderosa pine forest, Oregon, USA
Year: 2013
Climate change is expected to increase disturbances such as stand-replacing wildfire in many ecosystems, which have the potential to drive rapid turnover in ecological communities. Ecosystem recovery, and therefore maintenance of critical structures and functions (resilience), is likely to vary across environmental gradients such as moisture availability, but has received little study. We examined conifer regeneration a decade following complete stand-replacing wildfire in dry coniferous forests spanning a 700 m elevation gradient where low elevation sites had relatively high moisture stress…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoration of dry forests in eastern Oregon: A field guide
Year: 2013
Dry Forest landscapes dominated by pine and mixed-conifer forests composed of ponderosa pine and associated coniferous species, such as Douglas-fir and white or grand fir, are extensive in western North America, including the Pacific Northwest (Franklin and Dyrness, 1988). These forests typically occupy landscapes that are moisture limited and historically experienced disturbance regimes that included frequent wildfire. On many sites fires were predominantly low severity but mixed-severity and, occasionally, even high-severity wildfire occurred, the latter primarily in areas at higher…
Publication Type: Report
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
Assessing potential climate change effects on vegetation using a linked model approach
Year: 2013
We developed a process that links the mechanistic power of dynamic global vegetation models with the detailed vegetation dynamics of state-and-transition models to project local vegetation shifts driven by projected climate change. We applied our approach to central Oregon (USA) ecosystems using three climate change scenarios to assess potential future changes in species composition and community structure. Our results suggest that: (1) legacy effects incorporated in state-and-transition models realistically dampen climate change effects on vegetation; (2) species-specific response to fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatially extensive reconstructions show variable-severity fire and heterogeneous structure in historical western United States dry forests
Year: 2012
Aim Wildfire is often considered more severe now than historically in dry forests of the western United States. Tree-ring reconstructions, which suggest that historical dry forests were park-like with large, old trees maintained by low-severity fires,are from small, scattered studies. To overcome this limitation, we developed spatially comprehensive reconstructions across 927,000 ha in four landscapes, using anew method based on land surveys from c. 1880. Location Dry forests of the western United States. Methods We reconstructed forest structure for four large dry-forest landscapes using…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pole Creek Fire
Year: 2012
In September 9, 2012 a lightning strike hit the Pole Creek trailhead in the Deschutes National Forest, approximately 8 miles southwest of Sisters, Oregon. The wildfire was contained on October 17th after spreading over 26,000 acres of timber and brush. In response to this event, the Northwest Fire Science Consortium partnered with Oregon State University (OSU) College of Forestry, OSU Forestry & Natural Resources Extension, USFS Region 6, and the Central Oregon Fire Management Service to offer an opportunity for in-the-field learning in the immediate post-fire environment. Targeted…
Publication Type: Report
Photo Series for Quantifying Natural Fuels Volume XI : Eastern Oregon Sagebrush - Steppe and Spotted Owl Nesting Habitat in the Pacific Northwest
Year: 2012
Three series of photographs display a range of natural conditions and fuel loadings for sagebrush-steppe types that are ecotonal with grasses, western juniper, and ponderosa pine in eastern Oregon, and one series of photographs displays a range of natural conditions and fuel loadings for northern spotted owl nesting habitat in forest types in Washington and Oregon. Each group of photos includes inventory information summarizing vegetation composition, structure, and loading; woody material loading and density by size class; forest floor depth and loading; and various site characteristics. The…
Publication Type: Report
Smoke Science Plan: The Path Forward
Year: 2012
Wildland fire managers face increasingly steep challenges to meet air quality standards while planning prescribed fire and its inevitable smoke emissions. The goals of sound fire management practices, including fuel load reduction through prescribed burning, are often challenged by the need to minimize smoke impacts on communities. Wildfires, of course, also produce smoke, so managers must constantly weigh the benefits and risks of controlled burns and their generated emissions against potential wildfires and their generated emissions and must communicate those benefits and risks to the…
Publication Type: Report