Research Database
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9
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
Traditional knowledge of fire use by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in the eastside Cascades of Oregon Share via EmailShare on FacebookShare on LinkedIn
Year: 2019
We examined traditional knowledge of fire use by the Ichishikin (Sahaptin), Kitsht Wasco (Wasco), and Numu (Northern Paiute) peoples (now Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, CTWS) in the eastside Cascades of Oregon to generate insights for restoring conifer forest landscapes and enhancing culturally-valued resources. We examined qualitative and geospatial data derived from oral history interviews, participatory GIS focus groups, archival records, and historical forest surveys to characterize cultural fire regimes (CFRs) –an element of historical fire regimes– of moist mixed conifer (MMC),…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining post-fire vegetation recovery with Landsat time series analysis in three western North American forest types
Year: 2019
Background: Few studies have examined post-fire vegetation recovery in temperate forest ecosystems with Landsat time series analysis. We analyzed time series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) derived from LandTrendr spectral-temporal segmentation fitting to examine post-fire NBR recovery for several wildfires that occurred in three different coniferous forest types in western North America during the years 2000 to 2007. We summarized NBR recovery trends, and investigated the influence of burn severity, post-fire climate, and topography on post-fire vegetation recovery via random forest (RF)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Getting back to fire suméŝ: exploring a multi-disciplinary approach to incorporating traditional knowledge into fuels treatments
Year: 2019
Background Evaluating fuel treatment effectiveness is challenging when managing a landscape for diverse ecological, social, and economic values. We used a Participatory Geographic Information System (PGIS) to understand Confederated Colville Tribal (CCT) member views regarding the location and effectiveness of fuel treatments within their ancestral territory within the Colville National Forest (CNF) boundary. The 2015 North Star Fire burned 88 221 ha (218 000 acres) of the CCT ancestral territory. Results We sampled thirty plot pairs that were treated or untreated prior to being burned by the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tree regeneration following wildfires in the western US: a review
Year: 2019
Background: Wildfires, like many disturbances, can be catalysts for ecosystem change. Given projected climate change, tree regeneration declines and ecosystem shifts following severe wildfires are predicted. We reviewed scientific literature on post-fire tree regeneration to understand where and why no or few trees established. We wished to distinguish sites that won’t regenerate to trees because of changing climate from sites where trees could grow post fire if they had a seed source or were planted, thus supporting forest ecosystem services for society and nature, such as timber supply,…
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
Evaluating Model Predictions of Fire Induced Tree Mortality Using Wildfire-Affected Forest Inventory Measurements
Year: 2019
Forest land managers rely on predictions of tree mortality generated from fire behavior models to identify stands for post-fire salvage and to design fuel reduction treatments that reduce mortality. A key challenge in improving the accuracy of these predictions is selecting appropriate wind and fuel moisture inputs. Our objective was to evaluate postfire mortality predictions using the Forest Vegetation Simulator Fire and Fuels Extension (FVS-FFE) to determine if using representative fire-weather data would improve prediction accuracy over two default weather scenarios. We used pre- and post-…
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