Research Database
Displaying 1281 - 1300 of 1501
Dry Forest Zone Maps 2013
Year: 2013
The Dry Forest Investment Zone (DFIZ) is a five-year project to address common natural resource-based economic development challenges through increased networking and capacity building at a regional scale. Sustainable Northwest leads this project in partnership with Wallowa Resources in northeastern Oregon, the Watershed Research and Training Center in northern California, and the Ecosystem Workforce Program at the University of Oregon. The central components of the DFIZ strategy are: 1) To build strong local nonprofit organizations and collaborative processes to achieve forest and economic…
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
Changes in development near public forest lands in Oregon and Washington, 1974-2005: Implications for management
Year: 2013
Development owing to population increases over the last 30 years has greatly affected forested lands in the United States. To assess and compare increases in development, we counted changes in the number of structures on a systematic grid of photointerpreted points around public forest land in Washington and Oregon. Areas bordering public forest land are showing substantial increases in development, with the number of structures on private lands near almost all types of public forest more than doubling between the 1970s and 2000s. Lands bordering Washington’s Department of Natural Resources…
Publication Type: Report
Natural tree regeneration and coarse woody debris dynamics after a forest fire in the Western Cascade range
Year: 2013
We monitored coarse woody debris dynamics and natural tree regeneration over a 14-year period after the 1991 Warner Creek Fire, a 3631-ha (8,972-ac) mixed severity fire in the western Cascade Range of Oregon. Rates for tree mortality in the fire, postfire mortality, snag fall, and snag fragmentation all showed distinct patterns by tree diameter and species, with Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) more likely to survive a fire, and to remain standing as a snag, than other common tree species. Natural seedling regeneration was abundant, rapid, and highly variable in space.…
Publication Type: Report
Wildland Fire management: Are actively managed forests more resilient than passively managed forests?
Year: 2013
Large areas of federal lands in the western states are currently at high risk of severe wildfire and have many insect and disease problems, indicating a significant decline in forest health and resilience. Although research studies have not been done that would measure whether actively managed forests are more resilient to wildfires than passively managed forests, results from studies of hazardous fuels treatment effectiveness and the economic benefits from avoided costs of future wildfire suppression due to fuels treatment can be used to support an affirmative reply to the question. If a…
Publication Type: Report
Latent resilience in ponderosa pine forest: effects of resumed frequent fire
Year: 2013
Ecological systems often exhibit resilient states that are maintained through negative feedbacks. In ponderosa pine forests, fire historically represented the negative feedback mechanism that maintained ecosystem resilience; fire exclusion reduced that resilience, predisposing the transition to an alternative ecosystem state upon reintroduction of fire. We evaluated the effects of reintroduced frequent wildfire in unlogged, fire-excluded, ponderosa pine forest in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana, USA. Initial reintroduction of fire in 2003 reduced tree density and consumed surface fuels,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Interactions of insects, fire and climate on fuel loads and fire behavior in mixed conifer forest
Year: 2013
Mixed-conifer forests in the interior Pacific Northwest are subject to sporadic outbreaks of the western spruce budworm, the most destructive defoliator in western North America. Such outbreaks usually occur synchronously over broad regions and lead to widespread decreases in growth rates and low to moderate levels of mortality. In the last century, changing land use and fire suppression have led to an increase in the amount and density of host tree species, and changed fire regimes. This has altered the severity and frequency of both fire and western spruce budworm. In spite of the…
Publication Type: Report
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
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
Swiss Needle Cast
Year: 2013
Since the 1990s, there has been an epidemic of SNC affecting hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal Douglas-fir forests in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. This constitutes one of the largest foliage-disease epidemics of conifers in North America. SNC is also a localized problem in many inland areas of the west, especially in Montana, Idaho, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.
Publication Type: Report
On the use of a firebrand generator to investigate the ignition of structures in WUI fires
Year: 2013
An experimental apparatus has been constructed to generate a controlled and repeatable size and mass distribution of glowing firebrands. The present study reports on a series of experiments conducted in order to characterize the performance of this firebrand generator. Firebrand generator characterization and subsequent structural ignition experiments were performed at the Fire Research Wind Tunnel Facility (FRWTF) at the Building Research Institute (BRI) in Tsukuba, Japan. The firebrand generator was fed with mulch generated from Korean Pine trees. To produce repeatable initial conditions…
Publication Type: Report
Regional constraints to biological nitrogen fixation in post-fire forest communities
Year: 2013
Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) is a key ecological process that can restore nitrogen (N) lost in wildfire and shape the pace and pattern of post-fire forest recovery. To date, there is limited information on how climate and soil fertility interact to influence different pathways of BNF in early forest succession. We studied asymbiotic (forest floor and soil) and symbiotic (the shrub Ceanothus integerrimus) BNF rates across six sites in the Klamath National Forest, California, USA. We used combined gradient and experimental phosphorus (P) fertilization studies to explore cross-site…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoration of dry forests in eastern Oregon: A field guide
Year: 2013
Dry Forest landscapes dominated by pine and mixed-conifer forests composed of ponderosa pine and associated coniferous species, such as Douglas-fir and white or grand fir, are extensive in western North America, including the Pacific Northwest (Franklin and Dyrness, 1988). These forests typically occupy landscapes that are moisture limited and historically experienced disturbance regimes that included frequent wildfire. On many sites fires were predominantly low severity but mixed-severity and, occasionally, even high-severity wildfire occurred, the latter primarily in areas at higher…
Publication Type: Report
Closing the feedback loop: evaluation and adaptation in collaborative resource management
Year: 2013
This sourcebook provides answers from the field— strategies and tools that some collaborative resource management groups have used to systematically evaluate their work and adapt plans and management actions based on what they have learned. The examples described in this document are drawn from rapid assessments of nine collaborative resource management groups and informed by organizational and social learning, evaluation, and adaptive management concepts.
Publication Type: Report