Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 87
Climate Change Quarterly: Summer 2013
Year: 2013
A historical record of Pacific Northwest (defined here as west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon) heat waves is identified using the U.S. Historical Climate Network, version 2, daily data (1901–2009). Both daytime and nighttime events are examined, defining a heat wave as three consecutive days above the 99th percentile for the maximum and minimum temperature anomalies separately. Although the synoptic characteristics of the daytime and nighttime heat events are similar, they do indicate some differences between the two types of events. Most notable is a stronger influence of…
Publication Type: Report
The merits of prescribed fire outweigh potential carbon emission effects
Year: 2013
A White Paper developed by Association for Fire Ecology, International Association of Wildland Fire, Tall Timbers Research Station, and The Nature Conservancy.While North American ecosystems vary widely in their ecology and natural historical fire regimes, they are unified in benefitting from prescribed fire when judiciously applied with the goal of maintaining and restoring native ecosystem composition, structure, and function. On a modern landscape in which historical fire regimes cannot naturally occur due to fuel load build-up and resulting public safety concerns, the cornerstone…
Publication Type: Report
A Land Manager's Guide for Creating Fire-resistant Forests
Year: 2013
This publication provides an overview of how various silvicultural treatments affect fuel and fire behavior, and how to create fire-resistant forests. In properly treated, fire-resistant forests, fire intensity is reduced and overstory trees are more likely to survive than in untreated forests. Fire-resistant forests are not “fireproof” – under the right conditions, any forest will burn. Much of what we present here is pertinent to the drier forests of the Pacific Northwest, which have become extremely dense and fire prone.
Publication Type: Report
Overcoming barriers to firewise actions by residents
Year: 2013
Encouraging the public to take action (e.g., creating defensible space) that can reduce the likelihood of wildfire damage and decrease the likelihood of injury is a common approach to increasing wildfire safety and damage mitigation. This study was designed to improve our understanding of both individual and community actions that homeowners currently do or might take to protect their home or property, and the barriers that impede homeowners from completing firewise treatments to their home or property.
Publication Type: Report
Fuel Treatments and Fire Severity: A Meta-Analysis
Year: 2013
We employed meta-analysis and information theory to synthesize findings reported in the literature on the effects of fuel treatments on subsequent fire intensity and severity. Data were compiled from 19 publications that reported observed fire responses from 62 treated versus untreated contrasts. Effect sizes varied widely and the most informative grouping of studies distinguished three vegetation types and three types of fuel treatment. The resultant meta-analytic model is highly significant (p<0.001) and explains 78% of the variability in reported observations of fuel treatment…
Publication Type: Report
Social Science at the WUI: A Compendium of Research Results to Create Fire-Adapted Communities
Year: 2013
Over the past decade, a growing body of research has been conducted on the human dimensions of wildland fire. Building on a relatively small number of foundational studies, this research now addresses a wide range of topics including mitigation activities on private lands, fuels reduction treatments on public land, community impacts and resident behaviors during fire, acceptance of approaches to postfire restoration and recovery, and fire management policy and decision making. As this research has matured, there has been a recognition of the need to examine the full body of resulting…
Publication Type: Report
Crown fire behavior characteristics and prediction in conifer forests: a state-of-knowledge synthesis
Year: 2013
Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) project 09-S-03-1 was undertaken in response to JFSP Project Announcement No. FA-RFA09-0002 with respect to a synthesis on extreme fire behavior or more specifically a review and analysis of the literature dealing with certain features of crown fire behavior in conifer forests in the United States and adjacent regions of Canada. The key findings presented are organized along nine topical areas: types of crown fires; crown fire initiation; crown fire propagation; crown fire rate of spread; crown fire intensity and flame zone characteristics; crown fire area…
Publication Type: Report
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
Wildfire, Wildlands, and People: Understanding and preparing for wildfire in the wildland-urban interface
Year: 2013
Fire has historically played a fundamental ecological role in many of America’s wildland areas. However, the rising number of homes in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), associated impacts on lives and property from wildfire, and escalating costs of wildfire management have led to an urgent need for communities to become "fire-adapted." We present maps of the conterminous United States that illustrate historical natural fire regimes, the wildland-urban interface, and the number and location of structures burned since 1999. We outline a sampler of actions, programs, and community planning and…
Publication Type: Report
Restoring and Managing Mixed Conifer Forests in the PNW
Year: 2013
Many collaborative groups working across the eastside of Oregon and Washington have developed good working agreements on treatments appropriate for ponderosa pine forest types. These groups are actively supporting and helping to develop projects that will meet ecological objectives for dry forests while generating jobs and economic activity in local communities. Currently, there is less agreement on how to approach restoration and management of mixed-conifer forests, in large part because there does not appear to be a comparable scientific consensus as that which exists for ponderosa pine…
Publication Type: Conference Proceedings
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
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
Fire For Water: Forest Restoration for Ashland, OR
Year: 2013
The Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project has released “Fire for Water,” a 10-minute video (produced by Jon Schwedler, Darren Borgias and Chris Chambers) on the treatment work being done to protect the city of Ashland’s watershed. Some of the work in this multi-partner collaborative project is being supported by SPER funding, and the NW FLN is one of the co-sponsors of the video. For more information, contact Darren Borgias (dborgias@tnc.org). http://ashland.or.us/SectionIndex.asp?SectionID=503
Publication Type: Report
Pre-wildfire fuel reduction treatments result in more resilient forest structure a decade after wildfire
Year: 2013
Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire area. Data from 140 plots on seven paired treated-untreated sites indicated that pre-wildfire treatments reduced fire severity compared with untreated sites. In 2011, coarse woody debris loading (woody material.7.62 cm in diameter) was 257% higher and fine woody debris (woody material,7.62 cm)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Projected Future Changes in Vegetation in Western North America in the Twenty-First Century
Year: 2013
Rapid and broad-scale forest mortality associated with recent droughts, rising temperature, and insect outbreaks has been observed over western North America (NA). Climate models project additional future warming and increasing drought and water stress for this region. To assess future potential changes in vegetation distributions in western NA, the Community Earth System Model (CESM) coupled with its Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) was used under the future A2 emissions scenario. To better span uncertainties in future climate, eight sea surface temperature (SST) projections provided…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Has Fire Suppression Increased the Amount of Carbon Stored in Western US Forests?
Year: 2008
Active 20th century fire suppression in western US forests, and a resulting increase in stem density, is thought to account for a significant fraction of the NorthAmerican carbon sink. We compared California forest inventories from the 1930s with inventories from the 1990s to quantify changes in aboveground biomass. Stem density in mid-montane conifer forests increased by 34%, while live aboveground carbon stocks decreased by 26%. Increased stem density reflected an increase in the number of small trees and a net loss of large trees. Large trees contain a disproportionate amount of carbon,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Four centuries of soil carbon and nitrogen change after stand-replacing fire in a forest landscape in the western Cascade range of Oregon
Year: 2008
Episodic stand-replacing wildfire is a significant disturbance in mesic and moist Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) forests of the Pacific Northwest. We studied 24 forest stands with known fire histories in the western Cascade Range in Oregon to evaluate long-term impacts of stand-replacing wildfire on carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and dynamics within the forest floor (FF, Oe and Oa horizons) and the mineral soil (0–10 cm). Twelve of our stands burned approximately 150 years ago (“young”), and the other 12 burned approximately 550 years ago (“old”). Forest floor mean C…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Postfire woodpecker foraging in salvage-logged and unlogged forests of the Sierra Nevada
Year: 2008
In forests, high-severity burn patches — wherein most or all of the trees are killed by fire — often occur within a mosaic of low- and moderate-severity effects. Although there have been several studies of postfire salvage-logging effects on bird species, there have been few studies of effects on bird species associated with high-severity patches in forests that have otherwise burned at lower severities. From 2004 to 2006, we investigated the foraging presence or absence of three woodpecker species, the Black-backed (Picoides arcticus), Hairy (P. villosus), and White-headed (P. albolarvatus)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Ecological Importance of Severe Wildfires: Some Like it Hot
Year: 2008
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically. It remains unclear, however, how far these generalizations can be extrapolated in time and space, and how well they apply to the more mesic ponderosa pine systems and to other forest systems within the western United States.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Burned landscapes of southwestern Oregon: what's in it for Northern Spotted Owls?
Year: 2008
Northern spotted owls are known to spend time in areas burned by wildfire, but there has been little scientific investigation of how and why they use these landscapes. A trio of wildfires in southwestern Oregon during the summers of 2001 and 2002 burned through dozens of documented spotted owl territories, providing a rare opportunity to study many important aspects of how these raptors respond to wildfire in dry forest ecosystems. For this project researchers used radio telemetry and demographic surveys to investigate habitat selection, home range size, occupancy, productivity and survival…
Publication Type: Report