Research Database
Displaying 221 - 240 of 265
Relationships between climate and macroscale area burned in the western United States
Year: 2013
Increased wildfire activity (e.g. number of starts, area burned, fire behaviour) across the western United States in recent decades has heightened interest in resolving climate–fire relationships. Macroscale climate–fire relationships were examined in forested and non-forested lands for eight Geographic Area Coordination Centers in the western United States, using area burned derived from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity dataset (1984–2010). Fire-specific biophysical variables including fire danger and water balance metrics were considered in addition to standard climate variables of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Making monitoring count: project design for active adaptive management
Year: 2013
Ongoing environmental change requires that managers develop strategies capable of achieving multiple objectives in an uncertain future. Active adaptive management (AAM) offers a robust approach to reducing uncertainty while also considering diverse stakeholder perspectives. Important features of AAM include recognition of learning as a management objective, integration of monitoring throughout all aspects of project design and implementation, and use of experimental design in project planning. These features facilitate collaborator engagement and adaptive management based on credible…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Assessing the compatability of fuel treatments, wildfire risk, and conservation of Northern spotted owl habitats and populations in the eastern Cascades: A multi-scale analysis
Year: 2013
National Forests in the dry forest provinces on the east-side of the Oregon and Washington Cascades have been managed under the guidelines of local Forest Plans and the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), both of which specify large areas of late-successional reserves (LSRs). In contrast, the recently-released USDI Fish and Wildlife Service Revised Recovery Plan (RRP) for the Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) calls for development of dynamic and shifting mosaics in the dry forests, and retention of LSRs in moist forests of eastern Cascades of Oregon and Washington, to address NSO habitat and wildfire…
Publication Type: Report
Prescribed fire in North America forests and woodlands: history, current practice, and challenges
Year: 2013
Whether ignited by lightning or by Native Americans, fire once shaped many North American ecosystems. Euro–American settlement and 20th-century fire suppression practices drastically altered historic fire regimes, leading to excessive fuel accumulation and uncharacteristically severe wildfires in some areas and diminished flammability resulting from shifts to more fire-sensitive forest species in others. Prescribed fire is a valuable tool for fuel management and ecosystem restoration, but the practice is fraught with controversy and uncertainty. Here, we summarize fire use in the forests and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Seasonal variation in surface fuel moisture between unthinned and thinned mixed conifer forest, northern California, USA
Year: 2012
Reducing stand density is often used as a tool for mitigating the risk of high-intensity crown fires. However, concern has been expressed that opening stands might lead to greater drying of surface fuels, contributing to increased fire risk. The objective of this study was to determine whether woody fuel moisture differed between unthinned and thinned mixed-conifer stands. Sections of logs representing the 1000- and 10 000-h fuel sizes were placed at 72 stations within treatment units in the fall (autumn) of 2007. Following snow-melt in 2008, 10-h fuel sticks were added and all fuels were…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Review of Recent Advances in Risk Analysis for Wildfire Management
Year: 2012
Risk analysis evolved out of the need to make decisions concerning highly stochastic events, and is well suited to analyse the timing, location and potential effects of wildfires. Over the past 10 years, the application of risk analysis to wildland fire management has seen steady growth with new risk-based analytical tools that support a wide range of fire and fuels management planning scales from individual incidents to national, strategic interagency programs. After a brief review of the three components of fire risk – likelihood, intensity and effects – this paper reviews recent advances…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Ecological restoration using EBIPM
Year: 2012
When managing rangeland impacted by weeds, land managers often encounter plant communities where remnant desired vegetation is very scarce. When rangeland is this degraded, simply controlling weeds with the expectation that desired plants will be released from competition and return to dominate the site over time might not be adequate. Introducing propagules (i.e., seeds) of desired species through revegetation might be required. Ecologically Based Invasive Plant Management (EBIPM) serves as a decision-making framework for planning and implementing restoration and revegetation programs. This…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Climate Change, Forests, Fire, Water, and Fish: Building Resilient Landscapes, Streams, and Managers
Year: 2012
Fire will play an important role in shaping forest and stream ecosystems as the climate changes. Historic observations show increased dryness accompanying more widespread fire and forest die-off. These events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems and sometimes generate stepwise changes in ecosystems. Climate vulnerability assessments need to account for fire in their calculus. The biophysical template of forest and stream ecosystems determines much of their response to fire. This report describes the framework of how fire and climate change work together to affect forest and fish…
Publication Type: Report
The Importance of Framing for Communicating Risk and Managing Forest Health
Year: 2012
Despite the importance of effective communication about forest and fuel management, little is known about how best to frame information to facilitate public understanding and increase support. The results presented here indicate that framing a fuel management plan as necessary to restore "lost" forest health (as opposed to maintaining or improving forest health) will increase the willingness of individuals to support options that pose some likelihood of failure (i.e. risk). Strategic framing of communication for public audiences is necessary because of the common biases in judgment that can…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Alteration and Recovery of Slash Pile Burn Sites in the Restoration of a Fire-Maintained Ecosystem
Year: 2012
Restoration practices incorporating timber harvest (e.g. to remove undesirable species or reduce tree densities) may generate unmerchantable wood debris that is piled and burned for fuel reduction. Slash pile burns are common in longleaf pine ecosystem restoration that involves hardwood removal before reintroduction of frequent prescribed fire. In this context, long-lasting effects of slash pile burns may complicate restoration outcomes due to unintended alterations to vegetation, soils, and the soil seed bank. In this study, our objectives were to (1) examine alterations to the soil seed…
Publication Type: Journal Article
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
Does Wood Bioenergy Increase Carbon Stocks in Forests?
Year: 2012
Wood bioenergy is touted as carbon neutral because biological regrowth recaptures the carbon released in energy production. However, some argue that using wood as an energy feedstock will result in decreased forest stocks and thereby a net reduction of carbon sequestered by forests. Such arguments fail to recognize that increased demand for wood bioenergy could increase stocks of wood, a renewable resource. We address the carbon neutrality question using a dynamic optimization forest management model to examine the effect of increasing or decreasing wood bioenergy demand on an existing forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Effects of Forest Fuel-Reduction Treatments in the United States
Year: 2012
The current conditions of many seasonally dry forests in the western and southern United States, especially those that once experienced low- to moderate-intensity fire regimes, leave them uncharacteristically susceptible to high-severity wildfire. Both prescribed fire and its mechanical surrogates are generally successful in meeting short-term fuel-reduction objectives such that treated stands are more resilient to high-intensity wildfire. Most available evidence suggests that these objectives are typically accomplished with few unintended consequences, since most ecosystem components (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuel Treatment Effectiveness in California Yellow Pine and Mixed Conifer Forests
Year: 2012
We assessed the effectiveness of forest fuel thinning projects that explicitly removed surface and ladder fuels (all but one were combined mechanical and prescribed fire/pile burn prescriptions) in reducing fire severity and tree mortality in 12 forest fires that burned in eastern and southern California between 2005 and 2011. All treatments and fires occurred in yellow pine or mixed conifer forests, in a variety of landscape conditions. Most fires burned under warm, dry conditions, with moderate to high winds. With few exceptions, fire severity measures (bole char height, scorch and torch…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Impediments to prescribed fire across agency, landscape and manager: an example from northern California
Year: 2012
Though the need for prescribed fire is widely recognised, its use remains subject to a range of operational and social constraints. Research has focussed on identifying these constraints, yet past efforts have focussed disproportionately on single agencies and geographic regions. We examined constraints on prescribed fire by surveying a wide variety of organisations (including six state and federal agencies and several tribes, non-governmental organisations and timber companies) in northern California, a fire-prone region of the western United States. Across the region, prescribed burning…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fuels and Fire Behavior Dynamics in Bark Beetle-Attacked Forests in Western North America and Implications for Fire Management
Year: 2012
Declining forest health attributed to associations between extensive bark beetle-caused tree mortality, accumulations of hazardous fuels, wildfire, and climate change have catalyzed changes in forest health and wildfire protection policies of land management agencies. These changes subsequently prompted research to investigate the extent to which bark beetle-altered fuel complexes affect fire behavior. Although not yet rigorously quantified, the results of the investigations, in addition to a growing body of operational experience and research, indicates that predictable changes in surface,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Grass Seedling Demography and Sagebrush Steppe Restoration
Year: 2012
Seeding is a key management tool for arid rangeland. In these systems, however, seeded species often fail to establish. A recent study in Wyoming big sagebrush steppe suggested that over 90% of seeded native grass individuals die before seedlings emerged. This current study examines the timing and rate of seed germination, seedling emergence, and seedling death related to this demographic bottleneck. We seeded monocultures of two native perennial bunchgrasses, Pseudoroegenaria spicata (Pursh) Á. Löve and Elymus elymoides (Raf.) Swezey, and one introduced bunchgrass, Agropyron desertorum (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Scenarios of land use and land cover change in the conterminous United States: Utilizing the special report on emission scenarios at ecoregional scales
Year: 2012
Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management. This paper describes methods to downscale projections of land-use and land-cover change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Emission Scenarios to ecological regions of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Meta-analysis of avian and small-mammal response to fire severity and fire surrogate treatments in US fire-prone forests
Year: 2012
Management in fire-prone ecosystems relies widely upon application of prescribed fire and/or fire surrogate (e.g., forest thinning) treatments to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function. Recently, published literature examining wildlife response to fire and fire management has increased rapidly. However, none of this literature has been synthesized quantitatively, precluding assessment of consistent patterns of wildlife response among treatment types. Using meta-analysis, we examined the scientific literature on vertebrate demographic responses to burn severity (low/moderate, high), fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Estimating Consumption and Remaining Carbon in Burned Slash Piles
Year: 2012
Fuel reduction treatments to reduce fire risk have become commonplace in the fire adapted forests of western North America. These treatments generate significant woody debris, or slash, and burning this material in piles is a common and inexpensive approach to reducing fuel loads. Although slash pile burning is a common practice, there is little information on consumption or even a common methodology for estimating consumption. As considerations of carbon storage and emissions from forests increase, better means of quantifying burn piles are necessary. This study uses two methods, sector…
Publication Type: Journal Article