Research Database
Displaying 141 - 160 of 195
Trust: A planning guide for wildfire agencies & practitioners
Year: 2014
This planning guide is the outcome of an international collaboration of researchers and practitioners/field managers working in communities at risk of wildfire in three countries. Initially, the team of social scientists from Australia, Canada, and the United States utilized the collective research literature to examine factors that influence stakeholder trust. A working draft of this document was shared with experienced agency personnel and community leaders previous to interactive workshops and field visits in each country. This allowed for deliberations of the essential features of…
Publication Type: Report
Integrating Social, Economic, and Ecological Values Across Large Landscapes
Year: 2014
The Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP) was a multiyear effort to produce information, maps, and models to help land managers, policymakers, and others conduct mid- to broad-scale (e.g., watersheds to states and larger areas) prioritization of land management actions, perform landscape assessments, and estimate cumulative effects of management actions for planning and other purposes. The ILAP provided complete cross-ownership geospatial data and maps on current vegetation, potential vegetation, land ownership and management allocation classes, and other landscape attributes across…
Publication Type: Report
Graduate Research Innovation Awards Encourage Young Scientists to Ask Bold Questions
Year: 2014
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), in partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology,offers Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) awards yearly to a handful of top-quality graduatestudents conducting research in fire science. GRIN awards are intended to nurture the next generationof fire and fuels scientists and managers, enhance their professional development,help them become engaged with their community of peers, and equip them to tacklethe fire and fuels management challenges of today and tomorrow.
Publication Type: Report
Analysis of Meteorological Conditions for the Yakima Smoke Intrusion Case Study, 28 September 2009
Year: 2013
On 28 September 2009, the Naches Ranger District on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in south-central Washington State ignited an 800-ha prescribed fire. Later that afternoon, elevated PM2.5 concentrations and visible smoke were reported in Yakima, Washington, about 40 km east of the burn unit. The U.S. National Weather Service forecast for the day had predicted good dispersion conditions and winds that would carry the smoke to the less populated area north of Yakima. We undertook a case study of this event to determine whether conditions leading to the intrusion of the smoke plume into…
Publication Type: Report
Examination of the wind speed limit function in the Rothermel surface fire spread model
Year: 2013
The Rothermel surface fire spread model includes a wind speed limit, above which predicted rate of spread is constant. Complete derivation of the wind limit as a function of reaction intensity is given, along with an alternate result based on a changed assumption. Evidence indicates that both the original and the revised wind limits are too restrictive. Wind limit is based in part on data collected on the 7 February 1967 Tasmanian grassland fires. A reanalysis of the data indicates that these fires might not have been spreading in fully cured continuous grasslands, as assumed. In addition,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Estimating Critical Climate - Driven Thresholds in Landscape Dynamics Using Spatial Simulation Modeling: Climate Change Tipping Points in Fire Management
Year: 2013
Climate projections for the next 20-50 years forecast higher temperatures and variable precipitation for many landscapes in the western United States. Climate changes may cause or contribute to threshold shifts, or tipping points, where relatively small shifts in climate result in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in landscape patterns and fire regimes. Rather than simulate potential climate-fire interactions using future climate data derived from Global Climate Models (GCMs), we developed sets of progressively warmer and drier or wetter climate scenarios that span and exceed the range of…
Publication Type: Report
Climate change tipping points: A point of no return?
Year: 2013
Summer 2012 saw records fall for intensity of drought and number, size, and cost of wildfires in the Central and Western United States, and the climate forecast calls for more of the same in the near and distant future. When wildfire breaks out, emergency responders decide their immediate strategy based on past experience and quick judgment calls. But in the long term, land managers need to plan for a warmer climate on a time scale of decades, or even a century or more, to better reflect the life span of trees and forests. Studies supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) are…
Publication Type: Report
Modelling conditional burn probability patterns for large wildland fires
Year: 2013
We present a technique for modelling conditional burn probability patterns in two dimensions for large wildland fires. The intended use for the model is strategic program planning when information about future fire weather and event durations is unavailable and estimates of the average probabilistic shape and extent of large fires on a landscape are needed. To model average conditional burn probability patterns, we organised historical fire data from Yellowstone National Park, USA, into a set of grids; one grid per fire. We captured various spatial relationships inherent in the gridded data…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Capturing Fire: RxCadre Takes Fire Measurements to a Whole New Level
Year: 2013
Models of fire behavior and effects do not always make accurate predictions, and there is not enough systematically gathered data to validate them. To help advance fire behavior and fire effects model development, the Joint Fire Science Program is helping fund the RxCADRE, which is made up of scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and several universities who orchestrate and collect data on prescribed burns in the southeastern United States. The RxCADRE-prescribed burns are yielding a comprehensive dataset of fire behavior, fire effects, and smoke chemistry and dynamics, with measurements…
Publication Type: Report
Foliar moisture content variations in lodgepole pine over the diurnal cycle during the red stage of mountain pine beetle attack
Year: 2013
Widespread outbreaks of the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) in the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud. var. latifolia Engelm.) forests of North America have produced stands with significant levels of recent tree mortality. The needle foliage from recently attacked trees typically turns red within one to two years of attack indicating successful colonization by the beetle and tree death. Attempts to model crown fire potential in these stands have assumed that the moisture content of dead foliage responds similarly to changes in air temperature and relative…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Current status and future needs of the BehavePlus fire modeling system
Year: 2013
The BehavePlus Fire Modeling System is among the most widely used systems for wildland fire prediction. It is designed for use in a range of tasks including wildfire behaviour prediction, prescribed fire planning, fire investigation, fuel hazard assessment, fire model understanding, communication and research. BehavePlus is based on mathematical models for fire behaviour, fire effects and fire environment. It is a point system for which conditions are constant for each calculation, but is designed to encourage examination of the effect of a range of conditions through tables and graphs.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing forest vegetation and fire simulation model performance after the Cold Springs wildfire, Washington, USA
Year: 2013
Given that resource managers rely on computer simulation models when it is difficult or expensive to obtain vital information directly, it is important to evaluate how well a particular model satisfies applications for which it is designed. The Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) is used widely for forest management in the US, and its scope and complexity continue to increase. This paper focuses on the accuracy of estimates made by the Fire and Fuels Extension (FFE-FVS) predictions through comparisons between model outputs and measured post-fire conditions for the Cold Springs wildfire and on…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing potential climate change effects on vegetation using a linked model approach
Year: 2013
We developed a process that links the mechanistic power of dynamic global vegetation models with the detailed vegetation dynamics of state-and-transition models to project local vegetation shifts driven by projected climate change. We applied our approach to central Oregon (USA) ecosystems using three climate change scenarios to assess potential future changes in species composition and community structure. Our results suggest that: (1) legacy effects incorporated in state-and-transition models realistically dampen climate change effects on vegetation; (2) species-specific response to fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimising fuel treatments over time and space
Year: 2013
Fuel treatments have been widely used as a tool to reduce catastrophic wildland fire risks in many forests around the world. However, it is a challenging task for forest managers to prioritise where, when and how to implement fuel treatments across a large forest landscape. In this study, an optimisation model was developed for long-term fuel management decisions at a landscape scale. Using a simulated annealing algorithm, the model optimises locations and timing of fuel treatments, while considering changes in forest dynamics over time, fire behaviour and spread, values at risk, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
ArcFuels10 System Overview
Year: 2013
Fire behavior modeling and geospatial analyses can provide tremendous insight for land managers as they grapple with the complex problems frequently encountered in wildfire risk assessments and fire and fuels management planning. Fuel management often is a particularly complicated process in which the benefits and potential impacts of fuel treatments need to be demonstrated in the context of land management goals and public expectations. The fuel treatment planning process is complicated by the lack of data assimilation among fire behavior models and weak linkages to geographic information…
Publication Type: Report
Fourmile Canyon Fire Findings
Year: 2012
The Fourmile Canyon Fire burned in the fall of 2010 in the Rocky Mountain Front Range adjacent to Boulder, Colorado. The fire occurred in steep, rugged terrain, primarily on privately owned mixed ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests. The fire started on September 6 when the humidity of the air was very dry (≈ <7%) and the winds were steadily blowing in the range of 15 miles per hour and gusting to over 40 miles per hour. These conditions prevailed for most of the first day when the fire burned approximately 5,700 acres and destroyed 162 homes. Because of the windy conditions, aircraft…
Publication Type: Report
Using niche models with climate projections to inform conservation management decisions
Year: 2012
Conservation science strives to inform management decisions. Applying niche models in concert with future climate projections to project species vulnerability to extinction, range size loss, or distribution shifts has emerged as a potentially useful tool for informing resource management decisions. Making climate change niche modeling useful to conservation decisions requires centering studies on the types of decisions that are made regarding the focal taxa of a niche model study. Recent recommendations for climate adaptation strategies suggest four types of decision makers: policy, habitat…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatio-temporal prediction of site index based on forest inventories and climate change scenarios
Year: 2012
A methodological framework is provided for the quantification of climate change effects on site index. Spatio-temporal predictions of site index are derived for six major tree species in the German state of Baden-Württemberg using simplified universal kriging (UK) based on large data sets from forest inventories and a climate sensitive site-index model. It is shown by a simulation study that, with the underlying large sample size, residual kriging using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of the mean function leads to an approximately unbiased spatial predictor. Moreover, the simulated…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Bark Beetles and Fire: Two forces of nature transforming western forests
Year: 2012
Bark beetles are chewing a wide swath through forests across North America. Over the past few years, infestations have become epidemic in lodgepole and spruce-fir forests of the Intermountain West. The resulting extensive acreages of dead trees are alarming the public and raising concern about risk of severe fire. Researchers supported by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) are examining the complicated relationship between bark beetles and wildfire, the two most influential natural disturbance agents in these forests. Are the beetles setting the stage for larger, more severe wildfires? And…
Publication Type: Report
Projecting future distributions of ecosystem climate niches: Uncertainties and management applications
Year: 2012
Projecting future distributions of ecosystems or species climate niches has widely been used to assess the potential impacts of climate change. However, variability in such projections for the future periods, particularly the variability arising from uncertain future climates, remains a critical challenge for incorporating these projections into climate change adaptation strategies. We combined the use of a robust statistical modeling technique with a simple consensus approach consolidating projected outcomes for multiple climate change scenarios, and exemplify how the results could guide…
Publication Type: Journal Article