Treesearch

Native American tribes regard plants that have evolved with frequent fire and other natural resources as living cultural resources that provide, water, food, medicines, and other material goods while also sustaining tribal cultural traditions. Collaborations between management agencies and tribes and other Native American groups can incorporate traditional ecological knowledge to facilitate placed-based understanding of how fire and various management practices affect tribal cultural resources and values. Collaboration approaches reviewed in this chapter and in chapter 9.6, “Collaboration...

Wildfires, especially large, severe, and unmanageable events, exert major influences on socioecological systems, not only through risks to life and property, but also losses of important values associated with mature forest stands. These events prompt decisions about post-wildfire management interventions, including short-term emergency responses, salvage logging, and other actions to influence long-term ecological trajectories, including tree planting and treatment of fuels and shrubs. The cost-effectiveness of such interventions has been increasingly scrutinized, and scientists have...

Combining data from provenance test studies with our current understanding of predicted climate change can be a powerful tool for informing reforestation efforts. However, the limitations of both sources of data need to be understood to develop an approach to ecological restoration that reduces risk and promotes the highest chance of successful reforestation.

Building on information summaries in two previous general technical reports (PSW-GTR-220 and PSW-GTR-237), this chapter focuses on four topics raised by forest managers and stakeholders as relevant to current forest management issues. Recent studies suggest that the gap size in lower and mid-elevation historical forests with active fire regimes was often about 0.12 to 0.32 ha (0.3 to 0.8 ac). This small size was sufficient to facilitate shade-intolerant pine regeneration, probably because the surrounding forest canopy was more open than is common in modern fire-suppressed forests. Treatment...

A number of studies undertaken by the Forest Service within the synthesis area have been designed and implemented to better understand both more immediate and long-term effects of treatments, including the Blacks Mountain Ecological Research Project (Oliver 2000); Goosenest Adaptive Management Area Project (Ritchie 2005); Long-Term Soil Productivity Study (Powers 2006); National Fire and Fire Surrogate Study (McIver and Fettig 2010); the Teakettle Experiment (North 2002); the Kings River Experimental Watersheds (KREW) (Hunsaker and Eagan 2003); the Plumas-Lassen Administrative Study, which...

Changes in climate can interact with other stressors to transform ecosystems and alter the services those ecosystems provide. This synopsis presents themes that run through the synthesis report regarding the impacts of a changing climate on the forests and waters of the synthesis area as well as long-term, broad-scale, science-based strategies to promote system resilience to those impacts. Scientific observations of climate variations in air temperatures and precipitation (type and quantity) and their interactions have been directly linked to changes in stream flows (amount and timing),...

National forests in the Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade bioregions have begun to review and revise their land and resource management plans (LRMPs). The three most southern national forests of the Sierra Nevada (Inyo, Sequoia, and Sierra) were selected to be the lead forests for the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region (Region 5) and are among the first of the Nation's 155 national forests to update their plans. The new planning rule requires the forests to consider the best available science and encourages a more active role for research in plan development. To help meet this...

This chapter begins by discussing current challenges for ecosystem management that emerged from multiple chapters of the full synthesis. It then considers integrative approaches to promote resilience, including general strategies that recognize the integrated nature of socioecological systems, the importance of promoting disturbance regimes upon which these systems have evolved, and opportunities to integrate social considerations into strategies (see chapter 1.1, "Introduction," for definitions of key terms). It continues by outlining an adaptive management approach to scale up current...

This synopsis presents three integrated themes that emerged from synthesizing information about biological resources. These themes become particularly important when managing forests to promote resilience at large landscape scales and long timeframes. This synopsis summarizes ideas in the longer chapter 1.2, “Integrative Approaches: Promoting Socioecological Resilience,” by using a concise style in which definitions, citations, and elaboration of some key points are included in endnotes. The emergent theme for promoting resilience is working with and adapting to dynamic ecological processes...

The objective is to evaluate procedures for direct measurement of fire spread rates (FSRs) based on archived repeat pass airborne thermal infrared (ATIR) imagery and to identify requirements for more refined measurements of FSR and environmental factors that influence FSR. Flaming front positions are delineated on sequential FireMapper ATIR images captured at relatively short repeat intervals enabling fire spread vectors and units to also be delineated. This approach provides the only means for estimating FSR for wildfires at spatial scales in the order of 101–103 m and timescales from 102...