Context: Reconstructing historical habitat could help reverse declining animal populations, but detailed, spatially comprehensive data are rare.
The number of large, high-severity fires has increased in the western United States over the past 30 years due to climate change and increasing tree density from fire suppression. Fuel quantity, topography, and weather during a burn control fire severity, and the relative contributions of these controls in mixed-severity fires in mountainous terrain are poorly understood.
With the potential for worsening fire conditions, discussion is escalating over how to best reduce effects on urban communities. A widely supported strategy is the creation of defensible space immediately surrounding homes and other structures.
Night-time flight searches using night vision goggles have the potential to improve early aerial detection of forest fires, which could in turn improve suppression effectiveness and reduce costs. Two sets of flight trials explored this potential in an operational context.
Fuel treatment implementation in dry forest types throughout the western United States is likely to increase in pace and scale in response to increasing incidence of large wildfires.
Mechanical mastication is a fuel management technique that disrupts the vertical continuity of forest fuels by shredding of trees and understory vegetation into a highly compacted surface fuel bed.
Recent studies of historical fire regimes indicate that fires occurring prior to Euro-American settlement were characterized by a high degree of spatial complexity that was driven by heterogeneity in vegetation/fuels and topography and influenced by variability in climate, which mediated the timing, effects, and extents of fires over time.
Current theory in disturbance ecology predicts that extreme disturbances in rapid succession can lead to dramatic changes in species composition or ecosystem processes due to interactions among disturbances. However, the extent to which less catastrophic, yet chronic, disturbances such as wind damage and fire interact is not well studied.
The Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP) was a multiyear effort to produce information, maps, and models to help land managers, policymakers, and others conduct mid- to broad-scale (e.g., watersheds to states and larger areas) prioritization of land management actions, perform landscape assessments, and estimate cumulative effects of management actions for planning and other purposes.
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.