Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 388
Comparing modeled soil temperature and moisture dynamics during prescribed fires, slash-pile burns and wildfires
Year: 2025
Background: Wildfires, prescribed fires and slash-pile burns are disturbances that occur in many terrestrial ecosystems. Such fires produce variable surface heat fluxes causing a spectrum of effects on soil, such as seed mortality, nutrient loss, changes in microbial activity and water repellency. Accurately modeling soil heating is vital to predicting these second-order fire effects. The process-based Massman HMV (Heat–Moisture–Vapor) model incorporates soil water evaporation, heat transport and water vapor movement, and captures the observed rapid evaporation of soil moisture. Aims:…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The national Fire and Fire Surrogate study: Effects of fuel treatments in the Western and Eastern United States after 20 years
Year: 2025
The national Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) study was initiated more than two decades ago with the goal of evaluating the ecological impacts of mechanical treatments and prescribed fire in different ecosystems across the United States. Since then, 4 of the original 12 sites remain active in managing and monitoring the original FFS study which provides a unique opportunity to look at the long-term effects of these treatments in different regions. These sites include California (Blodgett Forest Research Station), Montana (Lubrecht Experimental Forest), North Carolina (Green River Game Land), and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Insights Into Nature-Based Climate Solutions: Managing Forests for Climate Resilience and Carbon Stability
Year: 2025
Successful implementation of forest management as a nature-based climate solution is dependent on the durability of management-induced changes in forest carbon storage and sequestration. As forests face unprecedented stability risks in the face of ongoing climate change, much remains unknown regarding how management will impact forest stability, or how interactions with climate might shift the response of forests to management across spatiotemporal scales. Here, we used a process-based model to simulate multidecadal projections of forest dynamics in response to changes in management and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Designing Burn Windows for Integrated Fire Management in Wetlands: Why Should Flooding Not Be Overlooked?
Year: 2025
Changes in natural wildfire patterns can cause significant impacts on biodiversity, health, and economies. This has sparked discussions on better fire management. One strategy used by countries is Integrated Fire Management (IFM), with prescribed burning as one of the main tools. Prescribed burns effectively depend on specific burn windows. These windows, defined as flood-free areas like savannas, may not suit wetlands due to the influence of flooding on factors like fuel availability. We examined how hydrological patterns affect burn windows in wetlands, using the Pantanal as a model—the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid Declines in Southern Sierra Nevada Fisher Habitat Driven by Drought and Wildfire
Year: 2025
Aim: Forest disturbances are a natural ecological process, but climate and land-use change are altering disturbance regimes at an unprecedented rate, posing significant threats to biological communities and the species of concern. Our aim was to develop an automated habitat monitoring system for the Southern Sierra Nevada Distinct Population Segment of fisher (Pekania pennanti) in California, USA, to investigate long-term habitat trends and the effects of a recent megadrought and numerous megafires on fisher habitat.Location: Southern Sierra Nevada, California, USA.Methods: We used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mechanical mastication and prescribed burning reduce forest fuels and alter stand structure in dry coniferous forests
Year: 2025
Mechanical thinning is often prescribed in dry coniferous forests to reduce stand density, ladder fuels, and canopy fuels before using prescribed burning to manage surface fuels. Mechanical mastication is a tool for thinning forests where commercial thinning is not viable. We evaluated the effects of mastication-based thinning – with and without subsequent prescribed burning – on forest structure and fuels in dry coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest, USA. We thinned stands by masticating small-diameter trees and depositing the resulting slash on the forest floor. We then used…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Extreme Fire Spread Events Burn More Severely and Homogenize Postfire Landscapes in the Southwestern United States
Year: 2025
Extreme fire spread events rapidly burn large areas with disproportionate impacts on people and ecosystems. Such events are associated with warmer and drier fire seasons and are expected to increase in the future. Our understanding of the landscape outcomes of extreme events is limited, particularly regarding whether they burn more severely or produce spatial patterns less conducive to ecosystem recovery. To assess relationships between fire spread rates and landscape burn severity patterns, we used satellite fire detections to create day‐of‐burning maps for 623 fires comprising 4267 single‐…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Equity in resilience: a case study of community resilience to wildfire in southwestern Oregon, United States
Year: 2025
In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system. Marginalized communities are often most affected and least prepared for disturbances of this kind, where racism, colonialism, and structural equities prevent meaningful inclusion and equitable allocation of resources. This research centers these voices in an empirical study of the situated resilience of the Rogue River Basin, rooted in the work of community-based organizations…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Planted seedling regeneration using gap-based silviculture without herbicide in a wildfire-impacted forest of the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2025
Gap-based silviculture, which we define as the creation and maintenance of multi-aged stands through the periodic harvesting of discrete canopy gaps, provides a potential mechanism for converting previously high-graded stands into more heterogeneous, multi-aged structures. An advantage of small canopy gaps, relative to even-aged regeneration methods, is their potential to suppress shrub competition while allowing seedling growth without the use of herbicides or other means of managing shrub competition. While this idea has been proposed in principle, it has not been tested. The objective of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing fuel treatments and burn severity using global and local analyses
Year: 2025
BackgroundWildfires in western U.S. dry forest ecosystems have increased in size and severity during recent decades due primarily to more than a century of fire suppression, exclusion of Indigenous fire, and a rapidly warming climate. Fuel treatments have been employed to restore historical forest conditions and mitigate burn severity. However, their influence on burn severity in the context of other environmental variables and firefighting operations has not been extensively explored. The 2021 Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon provided an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Effects of long-term ecological research and cognitive biases on the evaluation of scientific information by public land managers in Oregon and Washington, USA
Year: 2025
Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access. Barriers, such as paywalls, insufficient capacity, and information overload play an important role in determining what scientific information managers have access and attend to. Additionally, characteristics of managers themselves also influence what scientific information they prioritize and implement. Specific factors likely…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Collapse and restoration of mature forest habitat in California
Year: 2025
Mature and old-growth forests provide critically important ecosystems services and wildlife habitats, but they are being lost at a rapid rate to uncharacteristic mega-disturbances. We developed a simulation system to project time-to-extinction for mature and old-growth forest habitat in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA. The simulation parameters were derived from a 1985–2022 empirical time-series of habitat for the southern Sierra Nevada fisher (Pekania pennanti), an endangered native mammal and old-forest obligate that has seen a 50 % decline in its habitat over the past…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Unpacking the pluralism paradox: collaborative governance outcomes in jurisdictionally complex environments
Year: 2025
Background: In collaborative governance, many of the factors that give rise to the need for collaboration are also identified by scholars as undermining its effectiveness. Complex task environments mean that multiple and varied interests are necessary to address problems, but this inherent pluralism may also increase conflict. This suggests a pluralism paradox.Aims: Our article advances theory and provides evidence about pluralism associated with jurisdictional affiliation and their relationship to collaborative governance outcomes during wildfires.Methods: We analyzed data…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Smoldering of Wood: Effects of Wind and Fuel Geometry
Year: 2024
Large and downed woody fuels remaining behind a wildfire’s flame front tend to burn in a smoldering regime, producing large quantities of toxic gases and particulate emissions, which deteriorates air quality and compromises human health. Smoldering burning rates are affected by fuel type and size, the amount of oxygen reaching the surface, and heat losses to the surroundings. An external wind has the dual effects of bringing fresh oxidizer to the fuel surface and porous interior, while at the same time enhancing convective cooling. In this work, a series of experiments were conducted on…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Five social and ethical considerations for using wildfire visualizations as a communication tool
Year: 2024
BackgroundIncreased use of visualizations as wildfire communication tools with public and professional audiences—particularly 3D videos and virtual or augmented reality—invites discussion of their ethical use in varied social and temporal contexts. Existing studies focus on the use of such visualizations prior to fire events and commonly use hypothetical scenarios intended to motivate proactive mitigation or explore decision-making, overlooking the insights that those who have already experienced fire events can provide to improve user engagement and understanding of wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Few large or many small fires: Using spatial scaling of severe fire to quantify effects of fire-size distribution shifts
Year: 2024
As wildfire activity increases and fire-size distributions potentially shift in many forested regions worldwide, anticipating the spatial patterns of burn severity expected with future fire activity is critical for ecological understanding and informing management and policy. Because spatial patterns of burn severity are influenced by a complex mixture of drivers, they remain difficult to predict for any given burned landscape. At broader extents, however, spatial scaling relationships relating high-severity patch size and shape to overall fire size, when combined with scenarios regarding…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Characterization of Fire-Management Research: A Bibliometric Review of Global Networks and Themes
Year: 2024
Although humans have interacted with wildfires for millennia, a science-based approach to fire management has evolved in recent decades. This paper reviews the development of fire-management research, focusing on publications that use this term in their title, abstract, or keywords identified on the Scopus platform. This resulted in the identification of 5624 documents published between 1973 and 2021. Publication rates have particularly increased since 2010. The paper details the characteristics of this body of the literature, including the main authors, institutions, and countries.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network
Year: 2024
We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Thinning and prescribed burning increase shade-tolerant conifer regeneration in a fire excluded mixed-conifer forest
Year: 2024
Fire exclusion and past management have altered the composition, structure, and function of frequent-fire forests throughout western North America. In mixed-conifer forests of the California Sierra Nevada, fire exclusion has exacerbated the effects of drought and endemic bark beetles, resulting in extensive mortality of fire-adapted pine species. Thinning and prescribed fire are widely used in these forests to reduce fuels, moderate fire behavior, and restore ecosystems. Tree regeneration influences future forest composition and structure, and therefore future resilience to disturbances, but…
Publication Type: Journal Article
When do contemporary wildfires restore forest structures in the Sierra Nevada?
Year: 2024
Background: Following a century of fire suppression in western North America, managers use forest restoration treatments to reduce fuel loads and reintroduce key processes like fire. However, annual area burned by wildfire frequently outpaces the application of restoration treatments. As this trend continues under climate change, it is essential that we understand the effects of contemporary wildfires on forest ecosystems and the extent to which post-fire structures are meeting common forest restoration objectives. In this study, we used airborne lidar to evaluate fire effects across yellow…
Publication Type: Journal Article