Research Database
Displaying 141 - 160 of 192
Recovery and adaptation after wildfire on the Colorado Front Range (2010-2012)
Year: 2016
Following the loss of homes to wildfire, when risk has been made apparent, homeowners must decide whether to rebuild, and choose materials and vegetation, while local governments guide recovery and rebuilding. As wildfires are smaller and more localised than other disasters, it is unclear if recovery after wildfire results in policy change and adaptation, decreasing assets at risk, or if recovery encourages reinvestment in hazard-prone areas. We studied three wildfires on the Colorado Front Range from2010 to 2012 that each destroyed over 150homes, describing policy response and characterising…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire response of riparian vegetation in a heavily browsed environment
Year: 2015
Severe wildfires infrequently occur in large heterogeneous riparian valleys. Riparian areas may affect fire behavior and the pattern of burning due to saturated soils and patchy fuels that may have high moisture content in live and dead stems. We examined the effects of a severe fire on the dominant riparian vegetation: thin-leaf alder, river birch and willow, in a broad riparian valley in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, USA. We mapped the canopy stem mortality and basal resprouting of 4507 first year post fire and 643 second year post fire individuals that had been the dominant woody…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Temporal fuel dynamics following high-severity fire in dry mixed conifer forests of the eastern Cascades, Oregon, USA
Year: 2015
Fire-resilient landscapes require the recurrent use of fire, but successful use of fire in previously burned areas must account for temporal fuel dynamics. We analysed factors influencing temporal fuel dynamics across a 24-year spatial chronosequence of unmanipulated dry mixed conifer forests following high-severity fire. Duff and litter accumulated as bark sloughed from snags and leaves senesced from recovering vegetation, averaging 14.6 Mg ha–1 and 22.1 Mg ha–1 at our 24-year post-fire site, respectively. 1-h fuels increased linearly, averaging 1.1 Mg ha–1 at our 24-year post-fire site,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sources and implications of bias and uncertainty in a century of US wildfire activity data
Year: 2015
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a wealth of US wildfire activity data available for such analyses, but users must be aware of inherent reporting biases, inconsistencies and uncertainty in the data in order to maximise the integrity and utility of their work. Data for analysis are generally acquired from archival summary reports of the federal or interagency fire organisations; incident-level wildfire reporting systems of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Vegetation Recovery in Slash-Pile Scars Following Conifer Removal in a Grassland-Restoration Experiment
Year: 2014
A principal challenge to restoring tree-invaded grasslands is the removal of woody biomass. Burning of slash piles to reduce woody residues from forest restoration practices generates intense, prolonged heating, with adverse effects on soils and vegetation. In this study, we examined vegetation responses to pile burning following tree removal from conifer-invaded grasslands of the Oregon Cascades. We quantified the longevity and magnitude of fire effects by comparing ground conditions and the cover and richness of plant species in burn-scar centers (higher-intensity fire) and edges (lower-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Effectiveness and Limitations of Fuel Modeling Using the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator
Year: 2014
Fuel treatment effectiveness is often evaluated with fire behavior modeling systems that use fuel models to generate fire behavior outputs. How surface fuels are assigned, either using one of the 53 stylized fuel models or developing custom fuel models, can affect predicted fire behavior. We collected surface and canopy fuels data before and 1, 2, 5, and 8 years after prescribed fire treatments across 10 national forests in California. Two new methods of assigning fuel models within the Fire and FuelsExtension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator were evaluated. Field-based values for dead and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing the quality of forest fuel loading data collected using public participation methods and smartphones
Year: 2014
Effective wildfire management in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) depends on timely data on forest fuel loading to inform management decisions. Mobile personal communication devices, such as smartphones, present new opportunities to collect data in the WUI, using sensors within the device – such as the camera, global positioning system (GPS), accelerometer, compass, data storage and networked data transfer. In addition to providing a tool for forest professionals, smartphones can also facilitate engaging other members of the community in forest management as they are now available to a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Landsat time series and lidar as predictors of live and dead basal area across five bark beetle-affected forests
Year: 2014
Bark beetle-caused tree mortality affects important forest ecosystem processes. Remote sensing methodologies that quantify live and dead basal area (BA) in bark beetle-affected forests can provide valuable information to forest managers and researchers. We compared the utility of light detection and ranging (lidar) and the Landsat-based detection of trends in disturbance and recovery (LandTrendr) algorithm to predict total, live, dead, and percent dead BA in five bark beetle-affected forests in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon, USA. The BA response variables were predicted from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping day-of-burning with coarse-resolution satellite fire-detection data
Year: 2014
Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned. As such, several studies have used fire progression maps – in which the perimeter of an actively burning fire is mapped at a fairly high temporal resolution – or MODIS satellite data to determine the day-of-burning, thereby allowing an evaluation of the influence of daily weather. However, fire progression maps have many caveats, the most substantial being that they are rarely mapped…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Source of Sediment Hazards on Steep Slopes
Year: 2014
On steep slopes between 30-45 degrees, loose soil is stored behind plant “dams.” After a fire, > 75% of stored sediment is rapidly released to the channel system by dry ravel (the rolling, bouncing, and sliding of individual particles). The postfire hazard from stored sediment can be calculated at the catchment scale if the size and distribution of vegetation cover are known.
Publication Type: Report
A synthesis of post-fire Burned Area Reports from 1972 to 2009 for western US Forest Service lands: trends in wildfire characteristics and post-fire stabilisation treatments and expenditures
Year: 2014
Over 1200 post-fire assessment and treatment implementation reports from four decades (1970s–2000s) of western US forest fires have been examined to identify decadal patterns in fire characteristics and the justifications and expenditures for the post-fire treatments. The main trends found were: (1) the area burned by wildfire increased over time and the rate of increase accelerated after 1990; (2) the proportions of burned area assessed as low, moderate and high burn severity likely have remained fairly constant over time, but the use of satellite imagery that began c. 2000 increased the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mapping the daily progression of large wildland fires using MODIS active fire data
Year: 2014
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. For each fire, parameters for the kriging model were defined using variogram analysis. The optimal number of observations used to estimate a pixel’s time of burning varied between four and six among the fires studied. The median standard error from…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Challenges of assessing fire and burn severity using field measures, remote sensing and modelling
Year: 2014
Comprehensive assessment of ecological change after fires have burned forests and rangelands is important if we are to understand, predict and measure fire effects. We highlight the challenges in effective assessment of fire and burn severity in the field and using both remote sensing and simulation models. We draw on diverse recent research for guidance on assessing fire effects on vegetation and soil using field methods, remote sensing and models. We suggest that instead of collapsing many diverse, complex and interacting fire effects into a single severity index, the effects of fire should…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling Regional-Scale Wildland Fire Emissions with the Wildland Fire Emissions Information System
Year: 2014
As carbon modeling tools become more comprehensive, spatial data are needed to improve quantitative maps of carbon emissions from fire.The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) provides mapped estimates of carbon emissions from historical forest fires in the United States through a web browser. WFEIS improves access to data and provides a consistent approach to estimating emissions at landscape, regional, and continental scales. The system taps into data and tools developed by the U.S. Forest Serviceto describe fuels, fuel loadings, and fuel consumption and merges information…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Resprouting Chaparral Dies from Postfire Drought
Year: 2014
California’s chaparral plant community composition can change when fire is followed by intense drought. By measuring postfire population demography coupled with physiological measurements during a severe drought, Pratt et al. were the first to directly link resprout mortality to mechanisms of drought stress and show how chaparral may be affected in the future by the increased frequency of fires combined with drought.
Publication Type: Report
Five-year legacy of wildfire and salvage logging impacts on nutrient runoff and aquatic plant, invertebrate, and fish productivity
Year: 2014
Ecohydrological linkages between phosphorus (P) production, stream algae, benthic invertebrate, and fish communities were studied for 4 years after severe wildfire in the Rocky Mountains (Alberta, Canada). Mean concentrations of all forms of P (soluble reactive, total dissolved, particulate, and total) were 2 to 13 times greater in burned and post-fire salvage-logged streams than in unburned streams (p < 0.001). Post-disturbance recovery of P was slow with differences in P-discharge relationships still evident 5 years after the fire (p < 0.001). Coupled P and sediment interactions were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Influence of climate and environment on post-fire recovery of mountain sagbrush
Year: 2013
In arid and semi-arid landscapes around the world, wildfire plays a key role in maintaining species diversity. Dominant plant associations may depend upon particular fire regime characteristics for their persistence. Mountain shrub communities in high-elevation landscapes of the Intermountain West, USA, are strongly influenced by the post-fire recovery dynamics of the obligate-seeding shrub, mountain big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt. ssp. vaseyana [Rydb.] Beetle). This species is a short-distance disperser with a short-lived seedbank, leading to highly variable post-fire recovery…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Does seeding after wildfires in rangelands reduce erosion or invasive species?
Year: 2013
Mitigation of ecological damage caused by rangeland wildfires has historically been an issue restricted to the western United States. It has focused on conservation of ecosystem function through reducing soil erosion and spread of invasive plants. Effectiveness of mitigation treatments has been debated recently. We reviewed recent literature to conduct a meta-analysis of seeding after wildfires to determine if seedings may (1) protect ecosystems against soil erosion and (2) reduce invasion or abundance of undesirable nonnative plant species. Effectiveness of postfire seedings was examined in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pre-wildfire fuel reduction treatments result in more resilient forest structure a decade after wildfire
Year: 2013
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo–Chediski Fire area. Data from 140 plots on seven paired treated–untreated sites indicated that pre-wildfire treatments reduced fire severity compared with untreated sites. In 2011, coarse woody debris loading (woody material >7.62 cm in diameter) was 257% higher and fine woody debris (woody material <7…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sagebrush steppe recovery after fire varies by development phase of Juniperus occidentalis woodland
Year: 2013
Woodland ecosystems of the world have been changed by land use demands, altered fire regimes, invasive species and climate change. Reduced fire frequency is recognised as a main causative agent for Pinus–Juniperus L. (piñon–juniper) expansion in North American woodlands. Piñon–juniper control measures, including prescribed fire, are increasingly employed to restore sagebrush steppe communities. We compared vegetation recovery following prescribed fire on Phase 2 (mid-succession) and Phase 3 (late-succession) Juniperus occidentalis Hook. (western juniper) woodlands in Oregon. The herbaceous…
Publication Type: Journal Article