Treesearch

The Rangeland Ecology and Management program at Oklahoma State University recognized the need for a practical, hands-on course designed for undergraduate and graduate students, with instruction on conducting prescribed fires for vegetation management, wildlife management, and livestock management. Two separate prescribed fire courses were initiated in the spring of 2000. The first course instructs the students on the how, why, when and where of conducting prescribed fires and is taught in a formal classroom setting. Students also are required to participate in a minimum of five of the...

Fire managers are challenged with an ever-increasing array of both responsibilities and critics. As in the past, fire managers must master the elements of fire behavior and ecology using the latest technologies. In addition, today’s managers must be equipped with the skills necessary to understand and liaise with a burgeoning group of vocal stakeholders while also facing the complications of a changing landscape, particularly an increasing wildland-urban interface. These challenges have been embraced in the Fire and Fuels Management program of study at Cal Poly State University, San Luis...

Successfully educating homeowners and communities about wildland fire ecology and management, reducing hazardous fuels, and restoring fire-adapted forest ecosystems will place enormous demands on the budgets, resources, and staff of federal agencies for several decades to come. This work can be aided by collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are capable of mobilizing grants, donations, local practitioner expertise and indigenous knowledge, as well as volunteer labor from the private sector and local communities. NGOs can also utilize federal funding and resources to...

The relative importance of livestock grazing in limiting or enhancing oak recruitment remains unclear because results from previous studies have been contradictory. In Santa Barbara County, we have replicated large-scale planting experiments from 1997 to 2001 to determine the effects of cattle and other factors on seedling establishment of valley oak (Quercus lobata) and coast live oak (Q. agrifolia). We manipulated cattle grazing (ungrazed vs. winter-spring rotational grazing) and protection from small and large mammals. Rainfall and seed predation and herbivory by small mammals—most...

Recently, questions about the extent of thinning, the sustainability of forest management practices, and the compatibility with other uses were raised by the media, agency personnel, and environmental groups. In response, University of California Cooperative Extension and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Natural Resources Management Department collaborated to address these issues. In March 2006, a questionnaire was mailed to landowners of properties greater than 100 acres in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Monterey counties. A total of 2,786 questionnaires were mailed, with 450 completed and...

Approximately 70 percent of the contiguous United States is in private lands with half of this total in row crop or rangelands. Audubon California’s Landowner Stewardship Program engages with farmers and ranchers on conservation and restoration projects in a manner compatible with existing agricultural operations. To assess the success of these efforts, Audubon, University of California, Davis, Agricultural Research Service, and Michigan State University conducted multi-disciplinary studies across a range of habitats in Yolo County, California. We present the results from this multi-discipl...

California’s oak-woodlands are a complex, often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and woodland patches. While soil type and depth, topography, aspect, and geological substrate influence the distribution of these patches, disturbance and biological interactions are also important determinants of the patchy distribution of these plant communities. Fire intensity and frequency can change the structure of these patches, while grazing can affect the speed of the species replacement. Different re-establishment strategies of woody species interacting with prevailing weather following...

Two long-term prescribed fire studies were established near Flagstaff, Arizona in 1976 and 1977. One of the sites, Chimney Spring, is located on a basalt soil type and had not received any natural fires for the previous 100 years. The other site, called Limestone Flats, located on a sedimentary soil type, has a similar fire-free period but received a sanitation cut to remove the dead overstory in the early 1960s. The study was designed to test 1-, 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-yr burning rotations in southwestern old growth ponderosa pine stands. The primary objective was to determine if a...

With the focus of the National Fire Plan on decreasing fire risk in the wildland-urban interface, fire managers are increasingly tasked with reducing the fuel load in areas where mixed public and private ownership and a growing number of homes can make most fuel reduction methods problematic at best. In many of these intermix areas, use of prescribed burning will be difficult, and it is likely that thinning will be the dominant method for fuel load reduction. Yet little research has been done on acceptability of different thinning methods, and the current understanding is based primarily...

Spatial fuel treatment schedules were developed for the chaparral vegetation type on the Angeles National Forest using the Multi-resource Analysis and Geographic Information System (MAGIS). Schedules varied by the priority given to various wildland urban interface areas and the general forest, as well as by the number of acres treated per decade. The effectiveness of these spatial treatment schedules was compared to ‘No Action except fire suppression’ using stochastic simulation performed by the model Simulating Vegetative Patterns and Processes at Landscape Scales (SIMPPLLE). Results are...