Research Database
Displaying 61 - 76 of 76
Estimating Consumption and Remaining Carbon in Burned Slash Piles
Year: 2012
Fuel reduction treatments to reduce fire risk have become commonplace in the fire adapted forests of western North America. These treatments generate significant woody debris, or slash, and burning this material in piles is a common and inexpensive approach to reducing fuel loads. Although slash pile burning is a common practice, there is little information on consumption or even a common methodology for estimating consumption. As considerations of carbon storage and emissions from forests increase, better means of quantifying burn piles are necessary. This study uses two methods, sector…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Changes to Dryland Rainfall Result in Rapid Moss Mortality and Altered Soil Fertility
Year: 2012
Arid and semi-arid ecosystems cover ~40% of Earth's terrestrial surface, but we know little about how climate change will affect these widespread landscapes. Like many drylands, the Colorado Plateau in southwestern United States is predicted to experience elevated temperatures and alterations to the timing and amount of annual precipitation. We used a factorial warming and supplemental rainfall experiment on the Colorado Plateau to show that altered precipitation resulted in pronounced mortality of the widespread moss Syntrichia caninervis. Increased frequency of 1.2mm summer rainfall events…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Development of Risk Matrices for Evaluating Climatic Change Responses of Forested Habitats
Year: 2012
We present an approach to assess and compare risk from climate change among multiple species through a risk matrix, in which managers can quickly prioritize for species that need to have strategies developed, evaluated further, or watched. We base the matrix upon earlier work towards the National Climate Assessment for potential damage to infrastructures from climate change. Risk is defined here as the product of the likelihood of an event occurring and the consequences or impact of that event. In the context of species habitats, the likelihood component is related to the potential changes in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Northwest Forest Plan -- The First 15 Years: Status and Trends of Northern Spotted Owl Populations and Habitats
Year: 2011
This is the second in a series of periodic monitoring reports on northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) population and habitat trends on federally administered lands since implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994.Here we summarize results from a population analysis that included data from long-term demographic studies during 1985–2008. This data was analyzed separately by study area, and also in a meta-analysis across all study areas to assess temporal and spatial patterns in fecundity, apparent survival, recruitment, and annual rates of population change. Estimated…
Publication Type: Report
Short- and Long-term Effects of Fire on Carbon in US Dry Temperate Forest Systems
Year: 2011
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. Frequent fires consumed fuels on the forest floor and maintained open stand structures. Fire suppression has resulted in increased understory fuel loads and tree density; a change in structure that has caused a shift from low- to high-severity fires. More severe fires,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Woodpecker Habitat After the Fire
Year: 2011
Public land managers are asked to minimize fuel levels after fires, including using techniques such as salvage logging. They are also responsible for maintaining suitable wildlife habitat, especially for species of concern to state and federal agencies. An area where these responsibilities could conflict is in the use of salvage logging in burned-over areas that also represent good habitat for certain wildlife such as woodpeckers. Controversy over this conflict has led to litigation. Public land management agencies need consistent design criteria to maintain suitable habitats for these birds…
Publication Type: Report
Fuelwood Characteristics of Northwestern Conifers and Hardwoods (Updated)
Year: 2010
This report is an update of the original publication by Oregon State University in 1987 (Resource Bulletin 60). According to agreements, researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station and the Juneau Economic Development Council worked with Oregon State University to update this reference concerning wood energy properties. The fuelwood characteristics were reformatted and presented in tabular form, and a literature review was conducted to check for additional information published since 1987. This report provides fuelwood values for 34…
Publication Type: Report
Synthesis of Knowledge on the Effects of Fire and Fire Surrogates on Wildlife in U.S. Dry Forests
Year: 2009
Dry forests throughout the United States are fire-dependent ecosystems, and much attention has been given to restoring their ecological function. As such, land managers often are tasked with reintroducing fire via prescribed fire, wildland fire use, and fire-surrogate treatments such as thinning and mastication. During planning, managers frequently are expected to anticipate effects of management actions on wildlife species. This document represents a synthesis of existing knowledge on wildlife responses to fire and fire-surrogate treatments, presented in a useful, management-relevant format…
Publication Type: Report
Dry Forests of the Northeastern Cascades Fire and Fire Surrogate Project Site, Mission Creek, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest
Year: 2009
The Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) project is a large long-term metastudy established to assess the effectiveness and ecological impacts of burning and fire “surrogates” such as cuttings and mechanical fuel treatments that are used instead of fire, or in combination with fire, to restore dry forests. One of the 13 national FFS sites is the Northeastern Cascades site at Mission Creek on the Okanogan- Wenatchee National Forest. The study area includes 12 forested stands that encompass a representative range of dry forest conditions in the northeastern Cascade Range. We describe site histories…
Publication Type: Report
The Forest, the Fire and the Fungi: Studying the Effects of Prescribed Burning on Mycorrhizal Fungi in Crater Lake National Park
Year: 2009
A first-of-its-kind study, conducted in a forest of old-growth ponderosa pine and white fir in Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park, explored the relationships among seasonal prescribed burning, an array of soil attributes, and mycorrhizal fungal fruiting patterns. This three-fold approach not only made the study unique, but also enabled researchers to separate the effects of fire treatment from the effects of soil attributes on fungal fruiting patterns. The study’s site encompassed three different prescribed burn treatments—applied in the early spring, late spring, and fall of 2002—as well as…
Publication Type: Report
Burned landscapes of southwestern Oregon: what's in it for Northern Spotted Owls?
Year: 2008
Northern spotted owls are known to spend time in areas burned by wildfire, but there has been little scientific investigation of how and why they use these landscapes. A trio of wildfires in southwestern Oregon during the summers of 2001 and 2002 burned through dozens of documented spotted owl territories, providing a rare opportunity to study many important aspects of how these raptors respond to wildfire in dry forest ecosystems. For this project researchers used radio telemetry and demographic surveys to investigate habitat selection, home range size, occupancy, productivity and survival…
Publication Type: Report
Postfire woodpecker foraging in salvage-logged and unlogged forests of the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2008
In forests, high-severity burn patches — wherein most or all of the trees are killed by fire — often occur within a mosaic of low- and moderate-severity effects. Although there have been several studies of postfire salvage-logging effects on bird species, there have been few studies of effects on bird species associated with high-severity patches in forests that have otherwise burned at lower severities. From 2004 to 2006, we investigated the foraging presence or absence of three woodpecker species, the Black-backed (Picoides arcticus), Hairy (P. villosus), and White-headed (P. albolarvatus)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Has Fire Suppression Increased the Amount of Carbon Stored in Western US Forests?
Year: 2008
Active 20th century fire suppression in western US forests, and a resulting increase in stem density, is thought to account for a significant fraction of the NorthAmerican carbon sink. We compared California forest inventories from the 1930s with inventories from the 1990s to quantify changes in aboveground biomass. Stem density in mid-montane conifer forests increased by 34%, while live aboveground carbon stocks decreased by 26%. Increased stem density reflected an increase in the number of small trees and a net loss of large trees. Large trees contain a disproportionate amount of carbon,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Four centuries of soil carbon and nitrogen change after stand-replacing fire in a forest landscape in the western Cascade range of Oregon
Year: 2008
Episodic stand-replacing wildfire is a significant disturbance in mesic and moist Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) forests of the Pacific Northwest. We studied 24 forest stands with known fire histories in the western Cascade Range in Oregon to evaluate long-term impacts of stand-replacing wildfire on carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and dynamics within the forest floor (FF, Oe and Oa horizons) and the mineral soil (0–10 cm). Twelve of our stands burned approximately 150 years ago (“young”), and the other 12 burned approximately 550 years ago (“old”). Forest floor mean C…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Ecological Importance of Severe Wildfires: Some Like it Hot
Year: 2008
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically. It remains unclear, however, how far these generalizations can be extrapolated in time and space, and how well they apply to the more mesic ponderosa pine systems and to other forest systems within the western United States.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Do wood-boring beetles influence the flammability of deadwood?
Year:
Global warming increases the risk of wildfire and insect outbreaks, potentially reducing the carbon storage function of coarse woody debris (CWD). There is an increasing focus on the interactive effects of wildfire and insect infestation on forest carbon, but the impact of wood-boring beetle tunnels via their effect on the flammability of deadwood remains unexplored. We hypothesized that the presence of beetle holes, at natural densities, can affect its flammability positively through increased surface area and enhanced oxygen availability in the wood. To test this, wood-boring beetle holes…
Publication Type: Journal Article