Research Database
Displaying 201 - 220 of 306
Using an agent-based model to examine forest management outcomes in a fire-prone landscape in Oregon, USA.
Year: 2017
Fire-prone landscapes present many challenges for both managers and policy makers in developing adaptive behaviors and institutions. We used a coupled human and natural systems framework and an agent-based landscape model to examine how alternative management scenarios affect fire and ecosystem services metrics in a fire-prone multiownership landscape in the eastern Cascades of Oregon. Our model incorporated existing models of vegetation succession and fire spread and information from original empirical studies of landowner decision making. Our findings indicate that alternative management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Impacts of different land management histories on forest change
Year: 2017
Many western North American forest types have experienced considerable changes in ecosystem structure, composition, and function as a result of both fire exclusion and timber harvesting. These two influences co-occurred over a large portion of dry forests, making it difficult to know the strength of either one on its own or the potential for an interaction between the two. In this study, we used contemporary remeasurements of a systematic historical forest inventory to investigate forest change in the Sierra Nevada. The historical data opportunistically spanned a significant land management…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Whither the paradigm shift? Large wildland fires and the wildfire paradox offer opportunities for a new paradigm of ecological fire management
Year: 2017
The growing frequency of large wildland fires has raised awareness of the ‘wildfire paradox’ and the ‘firefighting trap’ that are both rooted in the fire exclusion paradigm. However, a paradigm shift has been unfolding in the wildland fire community that seeks to restore fire ecology processes across broad landscapes. This would involve managing rather than aggressively suppressing large fires. Examples of recent fire science publications demonstrating ‘new paradigm’ thinking or critical questioning of ‘old paradigm’ assumptions are offered as evidence of this shift in thinking. However,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Return on investment from fuel treatments to reduce severe wildfire and erosion in a watershed investment program in Colorado
Year: 2017
A small but growing number of watershed investment programs in the western United States focus on wildfire risk reduction to municipal water supplies. This paper used return on investment (ROI) analysis to quantify how the amounts and placement of fuel treatment interventions would reduce sediment loading to the Strontia Springs Reservoir in the Upper South Platte River watershed southwest of Denver, Colorado following an extreme fire event. We simulated various extents of fuel mitigation activities under two placement strategies: (a) a strategic treatment prioritization map and (b)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Federal fire managers’ perceptions of the importance, scarcity and substitutability of suppression resources
Year: 2017
Wildland firefighting in the United States is a complex and costly enterprise. While there are strong seasonal signatures for fire occurrence in specific regions of the United States, spatiotemporal occurrence of wildfire activity can have high inter-annual variability. Suppression resources come from a variety of jurisdictions and provide a wide range of skills, experience and associated mobility and logistical needs. Dispatch centres and regional and national resource allocation centres move suppression resources to respond to demand. However, little is known about the decision-making…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Efficacy of resource objective wildfires for restoration of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests in northern Arizona
Year: 2017
Current conditions in dry forests of the western United State have given rise to policy mandates for accelerated ecological restoration on U.S. National Forest System and other public lands. In southwestern ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Laws.) forests, mechanized tree thinning and prescribed fire are common restoration treatments but are not acceptable for all sites. Currently there is much interest in managing naturally ignited fires to accomplish restoration objectives but few studies have systematically examined the efficacy of such “resource objective” wildfires for restoring historical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Century of Wildland Fire Research - Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop
Year: 2017
Although ecosystems, humans, and fire have coexisted for millennia, changes in geology, ecology, hydrology, and climate as well as sociocultural, regulatory, and economic factors have converged to make wildland fire management exceptionally challenging for U.S. federal, state, and local authorities. Given the mounting, unsustainable costs and difficulty translating existing wildland fire science into policy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a 1-day workshop to focus on how a century of wildland fire research can contribute to improving wildland fire…
Publication Type: Report
Human exposure and sensitivity to globally extreme wildfire events
Year: 2017
Extreme wildfires have substantial economic, social and environmental impacts, but there is uncertainty whether such events are inevitable features of the Earth’s fire ecology or a legacy of poor management and planning. We identify 478 extreme wildfire events defined as the daily clusters of fire radiative power from MODIS, within a global 10 × 10 km lattice, between 2002 and 2013, which exceeded the 99.997th percentile of over 23 million cases of the ΣFRP 100 km−2 in the MODIS record. These events are globally distributed across all flammable biomes, and are strongly associated with extreme…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Science Core Curriculum
Year: 2017
This curriculum is designed to teach the basics of fire to non-fire-professional community members, including instructors and landowners, such as ranchers and farmers. The goal is to reduce risk and fire hazard through education and understanding.
Publication Type: Report
A framework for developing safe and effective large-fire response in a new fire management paradigm
Year: 2017
The impacts of wildfires have increased in recent decades because of historical forest and fire management, a rapidly changing climate, and an increasingly populated wildland urban interface. This increasingly complex fire environment highlights the importance of developing robust tools to support risk-informed decision making. While tools have been developed to aid fire management, few have focused on large-fire management and those that have typically simplified the decision environment such that they are not operationally relevant. Additionally, fire managers need to be able to evaluate…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Studying interregional wildland fire engine assignments for large fire suppression
Year: 2017
One crucial component of large fire response in the United States (US) is the sharing of wildland firefighting resources between regions: resources from regions experiencing low fire activity supplement resources in regions experiencing high fire activity. An important step towards improving the efficiency of resource sharing and related policies is to develop a better understanding of current assignment patterns. In this paper we examine the set of interregional wildland fire engine assignments for incidents in California and the Southwest Geographic Coordination Areas, utilising data from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Landscape-scale quantification of fire-induced change in canopy cover following mountain pine beetle outbreak and timber harvest
Year: 2017
Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover. Acquisition of pre- and post-fire Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data on the 2012 Pole Creek Fire in central Oregon provided an opportunity to isolate and quantify fire effects coincident with specific agents of change. This study characterizes the influence of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical perspective on the influence of wildfire policy, law, and informal institutions on management and forest resilience in a multiownership, frequent-fire, coupled human and natural system in Oregon, USA
Year: 2017
We examine the influence of wildfire institutions on management and forest resilience over time, drawing on research from a multiownership, frequent-fire, coupled human and natural system (CHANS) in the eastern Cascades of Oregon, USA. We constructed social-ecological histories of the study area’s three main landowner groups (national forest, private corporate, and tribal) using a historical framework (1905–2010). Our findings highlight two infrequently recognized linkages of multiownership, frequent-fire CHANS: (1) informal institutions (e.g., cultural norms, knowledge system and fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Review of broad-scale drought monitoring of forests: Toward an integrated data mining approach
Year: 2016
Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements. However, derived meteorological indices may not meaningfully capture drought impacts because drought responses can differ substantially among species, sites and regions. Meteorology-based approaches also require the characterization of current…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Developing and Implementing Climate Change Adaptation Options in Forest Ecosystems: A Case Study in Southwestern Oregon, USA
Year: 2016
Climate change will likely have significant effects on forest ecosystems worldwide. In Mediterranean regions, such as that in southwestern Oregon, USA, changes will likely be driven mainly by wildfire and drought. To minimize the negative effects of climate change, resource managers require tools and information to assess climate change vulnerabilities and to develop and implement adaptation actions. We developed an approach to facilitate development and implementation of climate change adaptation options in forest management. This approach, applied in a southwestern Oregon study region,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Available Science Assessment Project: Prescribed Fire and Climate Change in Northwest National Forests
Year: 2016
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing natural resource management. The disruptions it is causing require that we change how we consider conservation and resource management in order to ensure the future of habitats, species, and human communities, whether that means adopting new actions or adjusting the ways in which existing actions are implemented. However, practitioners often struggle with how to identify and prioritize specific climate adaptation actions, which are taken to either increase/enhance resilience or decrease vulnerability in a changing climate. Management…
Publication Type: Report
Risk terminology primer: Basic principles and a glossary for the wildland fire management community
Year: 2016
Risk management is being increasingly promoted as an appropriate method for addressing wildland fire management challenges. However, a lack of a common understanding of risk concepts and terminology is hindering effective application. In response, this General Technical Report provides a set of clear, consistent, understandable, and usable definitions for terms associated with wildland fire risk management. The material presented herein is not brand-new or innovative per se, but rather synthesizes the extant science so that readers can readily make a crosswalk to the professional literature.…
Publication Type: Report
1984–2010 trends in fire burn severity and area for the conterminous US
Year: 2016
Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity. Using a severity metric calculated by modelling the cumulative distribution of differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and Relativized dNBR (RdNBR) data, we examined burn area and burn severity of 4893 historical fires (1984–2010) distributed across the conterminous US (CONUS) and mapped by MTBS. Yearly mean burn severity values (weighted by area), maximum burn severity metric values, mean area of burn, maximum burn area and total burn area were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wilderness in the 21st Century: A Framework for Testing Assumptions about Ecological Intervention in Wilderness Using a Case Study in Fire Ecology in the Rocky Mountains
Year: 2016
Changes in the climate and in key ecological processes are prompting increased debate about ecological restoration and other interventions in wilderness. The prospect of intervention in wilderness raises legal, scientific, and values-based questions about the appropriateness of possible actions. In this article, we focus on the role of science to elucidate the potential need for intervention. We review the meaning of “untrammeled” from the 1964 Wilderness Act to aid our understanding of the legal context for potential interventions in wilderness. We explore the tension between restraint and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Facilitating knowledge transfer between researchers and wildfire practitioners about trust: An international case study
Year: 2016
The importance of knowledge transfer between researchers, policy makers and practitioners is widely recognized. However, barriers to knowledge transfer can make it difficult for practitioners to apply the results of scientific research. This paper describes a project that addressed barriers to knowledge transfer by involving wildfire management practitioners from three countries in developing a trust planning guide. The guide provides information about trust, factors that influence trust and actions that can be taken to build trust in the context of wildfire management. The researchers…
Publication Type: Journal Article