Research Database
Displaying 181 - 200 of 257
Burning the legacy? Influence of wildfire reburn on dead wood dynamics in a temperate conifer forest
Year: 2016
Dynamics of dead wood, a key component of forest structure, are not well described for mixed- severity fi re regimes with widely varying fi re intervals. A prominent form of such variation is when two stand- replacing fi res occur in rapid succession, commonly termed an early- seral “reburn.” These events are thought to strongly infl uence dead wood abundance in a regenerating forest, but this hypothesis has scarcely been tested. We measured dead wood following two overlapping wildfi res in coniferdominated forests of the Klamath Mountains, Oregon (USA), to assess whether reburning (15- yr…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Employing resilience in the United States Forest Service
Year: 2016
The concept of resilience has permeated the discourse of many land use and environmental agencies in an attempt to articulate how to develop and implement policies concerned with the social and ecological dimensions of natural disturbances. Several distinct definitions of resilience exist, each with its own concepts, focus and contexts related to land use policy and management. This often makes understanding the inherent objectives of policies and related principles challenging. The United States Forest Service (USFS) is one example where ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding the use of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Did the 2002 Hayman Fire, Colorado, USA, Burn with Uncharacteristic Severity?
Year: 2016
There is considerable interest in evaluating whether recent wildfires in dry conifer forests of western North America are burning with uncharacteristic severity—that is, with a severity outside the historical range of variability. In 2002, the Hayman Fire burned an unlogged 3400 ha dry conifer forest landscape in the Colorado Front Range, USA, that had been the subject of previous fire history and forest age structure research. We opportunistically leveraged pre-existing data from this research, in combination with post-fire aerial imagery, to provide insight into whether the Hayman Fire’s…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Opportunities to utilize traditional phenological knowledge to support adaptive management of social-ecological systems vulnerable to changes in climate and fire regimes
Year: 2016
The field of adaptive management has been embraced by researchers and managers in the United States as an approach to improve natural resource stewardship in the face of uncertainty and complex environmental problems. Integrating multiple knowledge sources and feedback mechanisms is an important step in this approach. Our objective is to contribute to the limited literature that describes the benefits of better integrating indigenous knowledge (IK) with other sources of knowledge in making adaptive-management decisions. Specifically, we advocate the integration of traditional phenological…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tree mortality based fire severity classification for forest inventories: a Pacific Northwest national forests example
Year: 2016
Determining how the frequency, severity, and extent of forest fires are changing in response to changes in management and climate is a key concern in many regions where fire is an important natural disturbance. In the USA the only national-scale fire severity classification uses satellite image change-detection to produce maps for large (>400 ha) fires, and is generated by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program. It is not clear how much forested area burns in smaller fires or whether ground-based fire severity estimates from a statistical sample of all forest lands might…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Post-fire morel (Morchella) mushroom abundance, spatial structure, and harvest sustainability
Year: 2016
Morel mushrooms are globally distributed, socially and economically important reproductive structures produced by fungi of the genus Morchella. Morels are highly prized edible mushrooms and significant harvests are collected throughout their range, especially in the first year after fire, when some morel species fruit prolifically. Few studies have quantified post-fire morel mushroom abundance, despite their widespread human use. The purpose of this study is to provide the first ever estimate of post-fire morel mushroom abundance in Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forest. Specifically, we…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California
Year: 2016
Increasingly, objectives for forests with moderate- or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland Pacific US, large, old, early seral trees were a key historical feature of many young and old forest successional patches, especially where fires frequently occurred. Large, old trees are naturally fire-tolerant, but today are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Relating Fire-Caused Change in Forest Structure to Remotely Sensed Estimates of Fire Severity
Year: 2016
Fire severity maps are an important tool for understanding fire effects on a landscape. The relative differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) is a commonly used severity index in California forests, and is typically divided into four categories: unchanged, low, moderate, and high. RdNBR is often calculated twice—from images collected the year of the fire (initial assessment) and during the summer of the year after the fire (extended assessment). Both collection times have been calibrated to field measurements, but field data with both pre-fire and post-fire observations of matched plots are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance
Year: 2015
Prompted by a series of increasingly destructive, expensive, and highly visible wildfire crises in human communities across the globe, a robust body of scholarship has emerged to theorize, conceptualize, and measure community-level resilience to wildfires. To date, however, insufficient consideration has been given to wildfire resilience as a process of adaptive governance mediated by institutions at multiple scales. Here we explore the possibilities for addressing this gap through an analysis of wildfire resilience among wildland-urban interface communities in the western region of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Recovery of small pile burn scars in conifer forests of the Colorado Front Range
Year: 2015
The ecological consequences of slash pile burning are a concern for land managers charged with maintaining forest soil productivity and native plant diversity. Fuel reduction and forest health management projects have created nearly 150,000 slash piles scheduled for burning on US Forest Service land in northern Colorado. The vast majority of these are small piles (<5 m diameter). Similar to larger piles, we found that burning small piles had significant immediate effects on soil nutrients and physical and chemical properties and native plant cover. To evaluate the need to rehabilitate…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Vegetation Response to Burn Severity, Native Grass Seeding, and Salvage Logging
Year: 2015
As the size and extent of wildfires has increased in recent decades, so has the cost and extent of post-fire management, including seeding and salvage logging. However, we know little about how burn severity, salvage logging, and post-fire seeding interact to influence vegetation recovery long-term. We sampled understory plant species richness, diversity, and canopy cover one to six years post fire (2006 to 2009, and 2011) on 72 permanent plots selected in a stratified random sample to define post-fire vegetation response to burn severity, post-fire seeding with native grasses, and salvage…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing adaptive capacity for restoring fire-dependent ecosystems: the Fire Learning Network’s Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges
Year: 2015
Prescribed fire is a critical tool for promoting restoration and increasing resilience in fire-adapted ecosystems, but there are barriers to its use, including a shortage of personnel with adequate ecological knowledge and operational expertise to implement prescribed fire across multijurisdictional landscapes. In the United States, recognized needs for both professional development and increased use of fire are not being met, often because of institutional limitations. The Fire Learning Network has been characterized as a multiscalar, collaborative network that works to enhance the adaptive…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire severity in southwestern Colorado unaffected by spruce beetle outbreak
Year: 2015
Recent large and severe outbreaks of native bark beetles have raised concern among the general public and land managers about potential for amplified fire activity in western North America. To date, the majority of studies examining bark beetle outbreaks and subsequent fire severity in the U.S. Rocky Mountains have focused on outbreaks of mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) forests, but few studies, particularly field studies, have addressed the effects of the severity of spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis Kirby) infestation on subsequent…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel and vegetation trends after wildfire in treated versus untreated forests
Year: 2015
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to increased interest in managing forests for resiliency to future disturbances. Comparing and contrasting treated versus untreated stands through multiple growing seasons postfire provide an opportunity to understand processes driving responses and can guide management decisions regarding resiliency. In treated and untreated forests, we compared fire effects 2‐10 growing seasons following fire on 3 different fires in New Mexico and Arizona. We estimated understory cover, standing crop, fuel loading, and basal area in (1) lop, pile, burn; (2…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature's Phoenix
Year: 2015
The Ecological Importance of High-Severity Fires, presents information on the current paradigm shift in the way people think about wildfire and ecosystems. While much of the current forest management in fire-adapted ecosystems, especially forests, is focused on fire prevention and suppression, little has been reported on the ecological role of fire, and nothing has been presented on the importance of high-severity fire with regards to the maintenance of native biodiversity and fire-dependent ecosystems and species.
Publication Type: Book
Are high-severity fires burning at much higher rates recently than historically in dry-forest landscapes of the Western USA.
Year: 2015
Dry forests at low elevations in temperate-zone mountains are commonly hypothesized to be at risk of exceptional rates of severe fire from climatic change and land-use effects. Their setting is fire-prone, they have been altered by land-uses, and fire severity may be increasing. However, where fires were excluded, increased fire could also be hypothesized as restorative of historical fire. These competing hypotheses are not well tested, as reference data prior to widespread land-use expansion were insufficient. Moreover, fire-climate projections were lacking for these forests. Here, I used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Topography, fuels, and fire exclusion drive fire severity of the Rim Fire in an old-growth mixed-conifer forest, Yosemite National Park, USA
Year: 2015
The number of large, high-severity fires has increased in the western United States over the past 30 years due to climate change and increasing tree density from fire suppression. Fuel quantity, topography, and weather during a burn control fire severity, and the relative contributions of these controls in mixed-severity fires in mountainous terrain are poorly understood. In 2013, the Rim Fire burned a previously studied 2125 ha area of mixed-conifer forest in Yosemite National Park. Data from 84 plots sampled in 2002 revealed increases in tree density, basal area, and fuel buildup since 1899…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Local Ecological Knowledge and Fire Management: What Does the Public Understand?
Year: 2015
As fire management agencies seek to implement more flexible fire management strategies, local understanding and support for these strategies become increasingly important. One issue associated with implementing more flexible fire management strategies is educating local populations about fire management and identifying what local populations know or do not know related to fire management. This study used survey data from three 2010 wildland fires to understand how ecological knowledge and education level affected fire management perception and understanding. Results indicated that increased…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The climate space of fire regimes in north-western North America
Year: 2015
Aim Studies of fire activity along environmental gradients have been undertaken, but the results of such studies have yet to be integrated with fire-regime analysis. We characterize fire-regime components along climate gradients and a gradient of human influence. Location We focus on a climatically diverse region of north-western North America extending from northern British Columbia, Canada, to northern Utah and Colorado, USA. Methods We used a multivariate framework to collapse 12 climatic variables into two major climate gradients and binned them into 73 discrete climate domains. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Historical northern spotted owl habitat and old-growth dry forests maintained by mixed-severity wildfires
Year: 2015
Context: Reconstructing historical habitat could help reverse declining animal populations, but detailed, spatially comprehensive data are rare. For example, habitat for the federally threatened Northern spotted owl (NSO; Strix occidentalis caurina) was thought historically rare because low-severity fires kept forests open and habitat restricted to fire refugia, but spatial historical data are lacking. Objectives: Here I use public land-surveys to spatially reconstruct NSO habitat and old-growth forests in dry forests in Oregon's Eastern Cascades in the late-1800s. I used reconstructions of…
Publication Type: Journal Article