Research Database
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9
Wildfire controls on land surface properties in mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests of Sierra Nevada and Klamath mountains, Western US
Year: 2022
This study examines the post-fire biogeophysical and biochemical dynamics after several high-severity wildfires that occurred in mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forest types in the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains regions between 1986 and 2017. We found a consistent pattern of reduced leaf area index (LAI) in the first year after fire, followed by gradual recovery over the subsequent 25 years. Recovery rate varied between forest types. For example, average summer LAI for 16-25 years post-fire was 88% of the pre-fire average for mixed conifers in the Sierra Nevada, 64% for ponderosa pine…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contemporary (1984–2020) fire history metrics for the conterminous United States and ecoregional differences by land ownership
Year: 2022
Background: Remotely sensed burned area products are critical to support fire modelling, policy, and management but often require further processing before use. Aim: We calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) including (1) fire frequency, (2) time since last burn (TSLB), (3) year of last burn, (4) longest fire-free interval, (5) average fire interval length, and (6) contemporary fire return interval (cFRI). Methods: Metrics were summarised by ecoregion and land ownership, and related to historical and cheatgrass…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Open Scientific Data: Country-level fire perimeter datasets (2001–2021)
Year: 2022
Fire activity is changing across many areas of the globe. Understanding how social and ecological systems respond to fire is an important topic for the coming century. But many countries do not have accessible fire history data. There are several satellite-based products available as gridded data, but these can be difficult to access and use, and require significant computational resources and time to convert into a usable product for a specific area of interest. We developed an open source software package called Fire Event Delineation for python (FIREDpy) which automatically downloads and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating Satellite Fire Detection Products and an Ensemble Approach for Estimating Burned Area in the United States
Year: 2022
Fire location and burning area are essential parameters for estimating fire emissions. However, ground-based fire data (such as fire perimeters from incident reports) are often not available with the timeliness required for real-time forecasting. Fire detection products derived from satellite instruments such as the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager or MODIS, on the other hand, are available in near real-time. Using a ground fire dataset of 2699 fires during 2017–2019, we fit a series of linear models that use multiple satellite fire detection products (HMS aggregate fire product, GOES-16,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Annual forest area burned (AFAB) in the western United States (US) has increased as a positive exponential function of rising aridity in recent decades. This non-linear response has important implications for AFAB in a changing climate, yet the cause of the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship has not been given rigorous attention. We investigated the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship in western US forests using a new 1984–2019 database of fire events and 2001–2020 satellite-based records of daily fire growth. While forest-fire frequency and duration grow linearly with aridity, the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modern Pyromes: Biogeographical Patterns of Fire Characteristics across the Contiguous United States
Year: 2022
In recent decades, wildfires in many areas of the United States (U.S.) have become larger and more frequent with increasing anthropogenic pressure, including interactions between climate, land-use change, and human ignitions. We aimed to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of contemporary fire characteristics across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We derived fire variables based on frequency, fire radiative power (FRP), event size, burned area, and season length from satellite-derived fire products and a government records database on a 50 km grid (1984–2020). We used k-means…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing trends in high-severity fire in the southwestern USA from 1984 to 2015
Year: 2019
In the last three decades, over 4.1 million hectares have burned in Arizona and New Mexico and the largest fires in documented history have occurred in the past two decades. Changes in burn severity over time, however, have not been well documented in forest and woodland ecosystems in the southwestern US. Using remotely sensed burn severity data from 1621 fires (>404 ha), we assessed trends from 1984 to 2015 in Arizona and New Mexico in (1) number of fires and total area burned in all vegetation types; (2) area burned, area of high-severity, and percent of high-severity fire in all forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining post-fire vegetation recovery with Landsat time series analysis in three western North American forest types
Year: 2019
Background: Few studies have examined post-fire vegetation recovery in temperate forest ecosystems with Landsat time series analysis. We analyzed time series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) derived from LandTrendr spectral-temporal segmentation fitting to examine post-fire NBR recovery for several wildfires that occurred in three different coniferous forest types in western North America during the years 2000 to 2007. We summarized NBR recovery trends, and investigated the influence of burn severity, post-fire climate, and topography on post-fire vegetation recovery via random forest (RF)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mixed-severity wildfire and habitat of an old-forest obligate
Year: 2019
The frequency, extent, and severity of wildfire strongly influence the structure and function of ecosystems. Mixed‐severity fire regimes are the most complex and least understood fire regimes, and variability of fire severity can occur at fine spatial and temporal scales, depending on previous disturbance history, topography, fuel continuity, vegetation type, and weather. During high fire weather in 2013, a complex of mixed‐severity wildfires burned across multiple ownerships within the Klamath‐Siskiyou ecoregion of southwestern Oregon where northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina)…
Publication Type: Journal Article