This guide describes the benefits, opportunities, and trade-offs concerning fuel treatments in the dry mixed conifer forests of northern California and the Klamath Mountains, Pacific Northwest Interior, northern and central Rocky Mountains, and Utah.
Management in fire-prone ecosystems relies widely upon application of prescribed fire and/or fire surrogate (e.g., forest thinning) treatments to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function. Recently, published literature examining wildlife response to fire and fire management has increased rapidly.
Wildfire effects upon riparian plant community structure, composition, and distribution may strongly influence the dynamic relationships between riparian vegetation and stream ecosystems. However, few studies have examined the influence of fire on these processes.
Previous studies have debated the flammability of young regenerating stands, especially those in a matrix of mature forest, and no consensus has emerged as to whether young stands are inherently prone to highseverity wildfire.
Fire is a keystone process in many ecosystems of western North America. Severe fires kill and consume large amounts of above- and belowground biomass and affect soils, resulting in long-lasting consequences for vegetation, aquatic ecosystem productivity and diversity, and other ecosystem properties.
Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and in so doing can mitigate the effects of climate change. Fire is a natural disturbance process in many forest systems that releases carbon back to the atmosphere. In dry temperate forests, fires historically burned with greater frequency and lower severity than they do today.
Understanding the influences of forest management practices on wildfire severity is critical in fire-prone ecosystems of the western United States. Newly available geospatial data sets characterizing vegetation, fuels, topography, and burn severity offer new opportunities for studying fuel treatment effectiveness at regional to national scales.
This project took advantage of pre-fi re data gathered within the perimeter of Colorado’s 2002 Hayman Fire. Researchers studied the unique fi re regime of Front Range ponderosa pine forests, and fi re effects on understory-plant communities and American Three-toed Woodpeckers.