Under a rapidly warming climate, a critical management issue in semiarid forests of western North America is how to increase forest resilience to wildfire.
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.
Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned.
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.
A White Paper developed by Association for Fire Ecology, International Association of Wildland Fire, Tall Timbers Research Station, and The Nature Conservancy.
Models of fire behavior and effects do not always make accurate predictions, and there is not enough systematically gathered data to validate them. To help advance fire behavior and fire effects model development, the Joint Fire Science Program is helping fund the RxCADRE, which is made up of scientists from the U.S.
On 28 September 2009, the Naches Ranger District on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in south-central Washington State ignited an 800-ha prescribed fire. Later that afternoon, elevated PM2.5 concentrations and visible smoke were reported in Yakima, Washington, about 40 km east of the burn unit. The U.S.
White ash results from the complete combustion of surface fuels, making it a logically simple retrospective indicator of surface fuel consumption. However, the strength of this relationship has been neither tested nor adequately demonstrated with field measurements.
Pile burning of conifer slash is a common fuel reduction practice in forests of the western United States that has a direct, yet poorly quantified effect on soil heating. To address this knowledge gap, we measured the heat pulse beneath hand-built piles ranging widely in fuel composition and pile size in sandy-textured soils of the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Whether ignited by lightning or by Native Americans, fire once shaped many North American ecosystems.