Throughout the Sierra Nevada, nearly a century of fire suppression has altered the tree species composition, forest structure, and fire regimes that were previously characteristic of montane forests.
There is a widespread view among land managers and others that the protected status of many forestlands in the western United States corresponds with higher fire severity levels due to historical restrictions on logging that contribute to greater amounts of biomass and fuel loading in less intensively managed areas, particularly after decades of fire suppression.
Timber is frequently salvage-logged following high-severity stand-replacing wildfire, but the practice is controversial. One concern is that compound disturbances could result in more deleterious impacts than either disturbance individually, with mechanical operations having the potential to set back recovering native species and increase invasion by non-native species.
Biological soil crusts contribute to ecosystem functions and occupy space that could be available to invasive annual grasses. Given disturbances in the semiarid shrub steppe communities, we embarked on a set of studies to investigate restoration potential of mosses in sagebrush steppe ecosystems.
Fire frequency is assumed to have exerted a strong influence on historical forest communities in the inland Pacific Northwest. This study reconstructs forest structure and composition in the year 1890 and fire frequency from 1760 to 1890 at 10 sites spanning a broad productivity gradient in the southern Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon.
We use the historical presence of high-severity fire patches in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States to make several points that we hope will encourage development of a more ecologically informed view of severe wildland fire effects. First, many plant and animal species use, and have sometimes evolved to depend on, severely burned forest conditions for their persistence.
Dynamics of dead wood, a key component of forest structure, are not well described for mixed- severity fi re regimes with widely varying fi re intervals.
Balancing economic, ecological, and social values has long been a challenge in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where conflict over timber harvest and old-growth habitat on public lands has been contentious for the past several decades.
A quantitative approach was adopted to explore facets of mindfulness and self-compassion in relation to their ability to predict crewmembers’ perceptions of their supervisors’ leadership capabilities. The sample comprised 43 wildland fire crews consisting of their primary supervisors (n = 43) and crewmembers (n = 246).
There is no uniform means for assessing social impact from wildland fires beyond statistics such as home loss, suppression costs and the number of residents evacuated. In this paper we argue for and provide a more comprehensive set of considerations for gauging social impact following wildfires.