Wildfires in the western US increasingly threaten infrastructure, air quality, and public health. Prescribed (“Rx”) fire is often proposed to mitigate future wildfires, but treatments remain limited, and few studies quantify their effectiveness on recent major wildfires.
Aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests are generally thought to impede fire spread, yet the extent of this effect is not well quantified in relation to other vegetation types.
Background. Fuel treatments are increasingly used to mitigate wildfire risks.
Aims. Proposing a novel, scalable and transferable methodology, this study investigates which treatment is (more) effective at a regional scale.
Warming temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation patterns are reducing winter snowpack and critical late-season streamflows. Here, we used two models (LANDIS-II and DHSVM) in linked simulations to evaluate the effects of wildfire and forest management scenarios on future snowpack and streamflow dynamics.
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.
Fuel-reduction and restoration treatments (“treatments”) are conducted extensively in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of interior western North America (“dry forests”) to reduce potential for uncharacteristically severe wildfire.
Recent increases in woody plant density in dryland ecosystems—or “woody encroachment”—around the world are often attributed to land-use changes such as increased livestock grazing and wildfire suppression or to global environmental trends (e.g., increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide).
Protecting habitat threatened by increasing wildfire size and frequency requires identifying the spatial intersection of wildfire behavior and ecological conditions that favor positive management outcomes.
Large wildfires, the dominant natural disturbance type in North American forests, can cause significant damage to human infrastructure. One well-known approach to reduce the threat of wildfires is the strategic removal of forest fuels in linear firebreaks that segment forest landscapes into distinct compartments.