The most destructive wildland fires occur in mixtures of living and dead vegetation, yet very little attention has been given to the fundamental differences between factors that control their flammability.
The rain shadow forests of the Olympic Peninsula exemplify a mixed-severity fire regime class in the midst of a highly productive landscape where spatial heterogeneity of fire severity may have significant implications for below and aboveground post-fire recovery.
Managers use restorative fire and thinning for ecological benefits and to convert fuel-heavy forests to fuel-lean landscapes that lessen the threat of stand-replacing wildfire. In this study, we evaluated the long-term impact of thinning and prescribed fire on soil biochemistry and the mycorrhizal fungi associated with ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa).
Fire frequency is changing globally and is projected to affect the global carbon cycle and climate.
Emissions from burning piles of post-harvest timber slash (Douglas-fir) in Grande Ronde, Oregon were sampled using an instrument platform lofted into the plume using a tether-controlled aerostat or balloon.
Changing climate and a legacy of fire-exclusion have increased the probability of high-severity wildfire, leading to an increased risk of forest carbon loss in ponderosa pine forests in the southwestern USA.
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.
Disturbance is a key influence on forest carbon dynamics, but the complexity of spatial and temporal patterns in forest disturbance makes it difficult to quantify their impacts on carbon flux over broad spatial domains.Here we used a time series of Landsat remote sensing images and a climate-driven carbon cycle process model to evaluate carbon fluxes at the ecoregion scale in western Oregon.
High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuous maps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires.