fuels

Background Wildland fires are fundamentally landscape phenomena, making it imperative to evaluate wildland fire strategic goals and fuel treatment effectiveness at large spatial and temporal scales. Outside of simulation models, there is limited information on how stand-level fuel treatments collectively contribute to broader landscape-level fuel management goals.

Background: Recent increases in wildfire activity in the Western USA are commonly attributed to a confuence of factors including climate change, human activity, and the accumulation of fuels due to fire suppression. However, a shortage of long-term forestry measurements makes it difficult to quantify regional changes in fuel loads over the past century.

• Effective wildland fire response and suppression are critical for reducing the size of frequent and severe wildfires, thereby reducing the risk of post-fire conversion to invasive annual grass-dominated plant communities. • Wildland firefighter safety and strategic deployment of resources are paramount for timely initial attack to prevent incidents from escalating.

Forest biological disturbance agents (BDAs) are insects, pathogens, and parasitic plants that affect tree decline, mortality, and forest ecosystems processes. BDAs are commonly thought to increase the likelihood and severity of fire by converting live standing trees to more flammable, dead and downed fuel.

Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire ignitions in BC using data from 2006 to 2020.

Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations.

Several recent studies have documented how fire severity affects the density and spatial patterns of tree regenerationin western North American ponderosa pine forests.

The structure and composition of sagebrush-dominated ecosystems have been altered by changes in fire regimes, land use, invasive species, and climate change. This often decreases resilience to disturbance and degrades critical habitat for species of conservation concern. Basin big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp.

The Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) was designed to store and archive wildland fuel characteristics within fuelbeds, defined as the inherent physical characteristics of fuels that contribute to fire behavior and effects. The FCCS represents fuel characteristics in six strata including canopy, shrubs, herbaceous fuels, downed wood, litter-lichen-moss, and ground fuels.

Background Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins; MPB), a bark beetle native to western North America, has caused vast areas of tree mortality over the last several decades. The majority of this mortality has been in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Douglas ex Loudon) forests and has heightened concerns over the potential for extreme fire behavior across large landscapes.