prescribed burning

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Comparing smoke emissions and impacts under alternative forest management regimes

Year of Publication

2022

Publication Type

Smoke from wildfires has become a growing public health issue around the world but especially in western North America and California. At the same time, managers and scientists recommend thinning and intentional use of wildland fires to restore forest health and reduce smoke from poorly controlled wildfires.

Wildfire, Smoke Exposure, Human Health, and Environmental Justice Need to be Integrated into Forest Restoration and Management

Year of Publication

2022

Publication Type

Journal Article

Purpose of Review: Increasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. Climate change and more than a century of fire exclusion and wildfire suppression have led to contemporary wildfires with more severe environmental impacts and human smoke exposure.

Fuel treatment effectiveness in the context of landform, vegetation, and large, wind‐driven wildfires

Year of Publication

2020

Publication Type

Journal Article

Large wildfires (>50,000 ha) are becoming increasingly common in semi‐arid landscapes of the western United States. Although fuel reduction treatments are used to mitigate potential wildfire effects, they can be overwhelmed in wind‐driven wildfire events with extreme fire behavior.

Fire and Forest Management in Montane Forests of the Northwestern States and California, USA

Year of Publication

2019

Publication Type

Journal Article

We reviewed forest management in the mountainous regions of several northwestern states and California in the United States and how it has impacted current issues facing these forests. We focused on the large-scale activities like fire suppression and logging which resulted in landscape level changes.

We’re not doing enough prescribed fire in the western United States to mitigate wildfire risk

Year of Publication

2019

Publication Type

Journal Article

Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge.

Understory vascular plant responses to retention harvesting with and without prescribed fire

Year of Publication

2019

Publication Type

Journal Article

Wildfire is the predominant natural disturbance in the boreal forests of western Canada. Natural disturbance-based forest management involves the use of retention harvesting to retain stand structural diversity post-harvest; however, this partial harvesting technique does not cause combustion of the forest floor as does fire.

NWFSC Research Brief #19 - Adjusting the lenses of past, present and future to bring into focus the role of frequent fire in dry forests

Year of Publication

2019

Product Type

Research Brief

In this study, the authors characterized historical fire return intervals, seasonality, and relationships with local and regional factors for 13 sites representative of southwestern Oregon dry forests on ridges and midslopes in the Rogue Basin of the Klamath Ecoregion. They used dendrochronology (cross-dated fire-scars from trees) to develop fire histories. Then using a systematic literature review, the authors were able to link local fire histories to a regional dataset and evaluate the data relative to more intensively studied conifer/hardwood forest types in California.

Long-Term Effects of Fire on Vegetation Structure and Predicted Fire Behavior in Wyoming Big Sagebrush Ecosystems

Year of Publication

2018

Publication Type

Journal Article

Fire historically occurred across the sagebrush steppe, but little is known about how patterns of post-fire fuel accumulation influence future fire in Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) communities.

NWFSC Research Brief #18 - Burning for Butterflies: Identifying Weather and Fuel Conditions that Protect and Promote Butterfly Habitat

Year of Publication

2018

Product Type

Research Brief

In this study, researchers measured vegetation structure and fuel moisture (pre-burn), weather conditions, belowground heat dosages, and peak temperatures (during the burn), and burn severities and unburned refugia (post-burn) for paired morning and afternoon prescribed burns at each of ten prairie sites throughout the south Puget Sound in 2014.

Improving forest sampling strategies for assessment of fuel reduction burning

Year of Publication

2017

Publication Type

Journal Article

Land managers typically make post hoc assessments of the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning (FRB), but often lack a rigorous sampling framework. A general, but untested, assumption is that variability in soil and fuel properties increases from small (∼1 m) to large spatial scales (∼10–100 km).

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