Treesearch

The risk and impact of fires have been significant on the San Bernardino National Forest. It is important to understand how residents of areas surrounded by the forest perceive the impact of fires. If fire management agencies understand these perceptions, fire management agencies will be better equipped to communicate with publics about risk-reduction efforts that agencies, community residents, and property owners need to take. Issues of interest include residents’ responses to fire risk, beliefs about personal and agency responsibility for addressing risk, personal experiences with fire,...

Alaska has relatively few invasive plants, and most of them are found only along the state’s limited road system. One of the most widely distributed invasives in the state, Melilotus alba Medik., or sweetclover, has been sown both as a forage crop and as a roadside stabilization species. Melilotus has recently been found to have moved from roadsides to the flood plains of at least three glacial rivers. This species has aggressively colonized the lower Stikine River flood plain and occurs there in dense, monospecific stands. It is at an earlier stage of colonization of the Matanuska River...

Aerial sketchmapping is the geolocating of features that are seen on the ground below an aircraft and the subsequent recording of those features. Traditional aerial sketchmapping methods required hand-sketching on hardcopy maps or photos and the translation of that information to a digital file. In 1996, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service embarked on a project to develop a digital aerial sketchmapping system (D-ASM) to replace or augment the traditional (manual) methodology. Advances in microprocessor speed and Personal Computer (PC) system performance made possible...

The tradeoffs that surround forest management are inherently complex, often involving multiple temporal and spatial scales. For example, conflicts may result when fuel treatments are designed to mediate long-term fuel hazards, but activities could impair sensitive aquatic habitat or degrade wildlife habitat in the short term. This complexity makes it hard for managers to describe and communicate the conditional nature of risk and to justify planned activities to stakeholders. In addition, our understanding of how proposed activities will affect resources of concern is often limited owing...

We present a prototype decision support system for evaluating wild-land fire danger and prioritizing subwatersheds for vegetation and fuels treatment. We demonstrate the use of the system with an example from the Rocky Mountain region in the State of Utah, which represents a planning area of about 4.8 million ha and encompasses 575 complete subwatersheds. In a logic model, we evaluate fire danger as a function of three primary topics: fire hazard, fire behavior, and ignition risk. Each primary topic has secondary topics under which data are evaluated. The logic model shows the state of...

Excessive wind, ice, and snow regularly cause major disturbances to forests in many parts of the world, significantly impacting both ecological conditions and economic returns to forest landowners. These events cause immediate losses for landowners, and the broken and uprooted trees left in the wake of a storm increase the risk that wildfires, disease, and pest outbreaks will cause secondary damage to the surviving trees. Although weather severity (e.g., windspeed and duration, or form and amount of precipitation) is clearly an important factor in the occurrence and severity of forest...

We present a conceptual model of the economic impacts of hurricanes on timber producers and consumers, offer a framework indicating how welfare impacts can be estimated using econometric estimates of timber price dynamics, and illustrate the advantages of using a welfare theoretic model, which includes (1) welfare estimates that are consistent with neo-classical economic theory, and (2) wealth transfers among various market participants that can be evaluated. Timber producers in the Southern United States are faced with the regular risk of damages from intense hurricanes. Individual events...

Florida’s Wildland Fire Risk Assessment (FRA), which was completed in 2002, is a statewide effort to develop a comprehensive suite of standardized spatial data layers developed to support implementation of a statewide fuels management strategy. By maintaining focus on fire and fuel dynamics for use with scientifically credible local to statewide applications, the FRA builds on a statewide surface fuels map, fire history data from many agencies, and weather data collected over a period of 20 years. Change detection is currently being utilized to update the statewide surface fuels layer. The...

Hurricane Katrina’s passage through south Mississippi on August 29, 2005, which damaged or destroyed thousands of hectares of forest land, was followed by massive salvage, cleanup, and assessment efforts. An initial assessment by the Mississippi Forestry Commission estimated that over $1 billion in raw wood material was downed by the storm, with county-level damage percentages ranging from 50 percent to 60 percent across Mississippi’s three coastal counties. Remotely sensed data were used to provide a more complete picture of the damage inflicted by Katrina. Moderate (56- to 29-m) and high...

Numerous factors, some of which cannot be controlled, are continually interacting with the forest resource, introducing risk to management, and making consistent predictable management outcomes uncertain. Included in these factors are threats or hazards such as windstorms and wildfire. Factors influencing the probability (risk) of windthrow or windsnap occurring can be grouped into four broad categories: regional climate, topographic exposure, soil properties, and stand characteristics. Of these categories, stand characteristics are most commonly and easily modified through forest managemen...