Research Database
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9
Fuel Profiles and Biomass Carbon Following Bark Beetle Outbreaks: Insights for Disturbance Interactions from a Historical Silvicultural Experiment
Year: 2023
Anticipating consequences of disturbance interactions on ecosystem structure and function is a critical management priority as disturbance activity increases with warming climate. Across the Northern Hemisphere, extensive tree mortality from recent bark beetle outbreaks raises concerns about potential fire behavior and post-fire forest function. Silvicultural treatments (that is, partial or complete cutting of forest stands) may reduce outbreak severity and subsequent fuel loads, but longevity of pre-outbreak treatment effects on outbreak severity and post-outbreak fuel profiles remains…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Identifying building locations in the wildland–urban interface before and after fires with convolutional neural networks
Year: 2023
Background: Wildland–urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated owing to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown. Additionally, CNNs are computationally intensive and technically complex, making them challenging for end-users, such as those who use or create WUI maps, to apply. Aims: We identified buildings pre- and post-wildfire and estimated building destruction for three California wildfires: Camp, Tubbs and Woolsey.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire frequency and vulnerability in California
Year: 2023
Wildfires pose a large and growing threat to communities across California, and understanding fire vulnerability and impacts can enable more effective risk management. Government hazard maps are often used to identify at-risk areas, but hazard zones and fire experience may have different implications for communities. This analysis of three decades of fire footprints, hazard maps, and census and real estate data shows that communities with high fire experience differ substantially from communities with high fire hazard. High-hazard communities average higher incomes than low- and no-hazard…
Publication Type: Journal Article
MCDM-Based Wildfire Risk Assessment: A Case Study on the State of Arizona
Year: 2023
The increasing frequency of wildfires has posed significant challenges to communities worldwide. The effectiveness of all aspects of disaster management depends on a credible estimation of the prevailing risk. Risk, the product of a hazard’s likelihood and its potential consequences, encompasses the probability of hazard occurrence, the exposure of assets to these hazards, existing vulnerabilities that amplify the consequences, and the capacity to manage, mitigate, and recover from their consequences. This paper employs the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework, which produces…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rethinking the focus on forest fires in federal wildland fire management: Landscape patterns and trends of non-forest and forest burned area
Year: 2023
For most of the 20th century and beyond, national wildland fire policies concerning fire suppression and fuels management have primarily focused on forested lands. Using summary statistics and landscape metrics, wildfire spatial patterns and trends for non-forest and forest burned area over the past two decades were examined across the U.S, and federal agency jurisdictions. This study found that wildfires burned more area of non-forest lands than forest lands at the scale of the conterminous and western U.S. and the Department of Interior (DOI). In an agency comparison, 74% of DOI burned area…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Case for Adaptive Management of Rangelands’ Wicked Problems
Year: 2023
Sagebrush-steppe restoration has long been seen as a wicked problem—each case has multifaceted problems with no universal solutions—and thus managers have had to adopt adaptive management techniques to meet ever-changing landscape demands. In this study, we characterize the efficacy of an adaptive management plan in a severely degraded sagebrush-steppe winter range habitat for mule deer for 8 yr by monitoring the plant community. During this time, managers have actively managed juniper encroachment through felling and responded to a 2014 wildfire by applying herbicide and seeding for native…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire needs annual grasses more than annual grasses need fire
Year: 2023
Sagebrush ecosystems of western North America are experiencing widespread loss and degradation by invasive annual grasses. Positive feedbacks between fire and annual grasses are often invoked to explain the rapid pace of these changes, yet annual grasses also appear capable of achieving dominance among vegetation communities that have not burned for many decades. Using a dynamic, remotely-sensed vegetation dataset in tandem with remotely-sensed fire perimeter and burn severity datasets, we examine the role of fire in transitions to and persistence of annual grass dominance in the U.S. Great…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Satellite-derived prefire vegetation predicts variation in field-based invasive annual grass cover after fir
Year: 2023
AimsInvasion by annual grasses (IAGs) and concomitant increases in wildfire are impacting many drylands globally, and an understanding of factors that contribute to or detract from community resistance to IAGs is needed to inform postfire restoration interventions. Prefire vegetation condition is often unknown in rangelands but it likely affects variation in postfire invasion resistance across large burned scars. Whether satellite-derived products like the Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) can fulfill prefire information needs and be used to parametrize models of fire recovery to inform…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Non-native plant invasion after fire in western USA varies by functional type and with climate
Year: 2023
Invasions by non-native plant species after fire can negatively affect important ecosystem services and lead to invasion-fire cycles that further degrade ecosystems. The relationship between fire and plant invasion is complex, and the risk of invasion varies greatly between functional types and across geographic scales. Here, we examined patterns and predictors of non-native plant invasion following fire across the western United States. We specifically analyzed how the abundance of non-native plants after fire was related to fire characteristics and environmental conditions, such as climate…
Publication Type: Journal Article