Treesearch

Firefighting crews count on a dampening of fire activity at night, thanks to a temperature drop and rising humidity, for much-needed respite and a chance to regroup for the next day’s efforts. However, a newly published study by Rocky Mountain Research Station fire scientists Patrick Freeborn and Matt Jolly and collaborators has found that the usual nighttime dampening of fire activity may be changing. Using satellite remote-sensing data from the heat-sensitive instrument MODIS, the researchers found that nighttime fire activity has increased as wildfires have grown larger. Understanding...

The changing climate is forcing foresters to rethink how and where they replant after a wildfire. Fire suppression and the loss of western white pine (WPP) to disease have made northern Rocky Mountain moist mixed-conifer forests less resilient to disturbance. Western white pine historically influenced the fire regime, creating a more herbaceous understory, which increased humidity and decreased the severity of fire burning through these stands of western white pine. The introduction of the invasive disease white pine blister rust killed countless western white pines from the 1940s through...

Conifer forests in the Interior Northwest are commonly affected by Armillaria root disease, an underground fungal infection that causes pockets of tree death. Gaps in the canopy that result from mortality caused by root disease change forests in significant ways: they alter the structure of the forest stand, changing how habitats evolve; they alter the distribution of fuel, changing the fire risk and potential fire behavior; and they lower tree density, reducing the productivity of timber operations.

For landowners and agencies seeking to implement grassland restoration projects and hazardous fuels reduction projects, biochar can be a key piece of the restoration-economics puzzle. Biochar plays a major role in moving excess organic matter from overstocked forest stands to the degraded range, forest, mine, and agricultural soils that need it. Biochar has several unique chemical and physical properties that make it very useful for retaining nutrients and water and improving soil conditions. It can be used to restore forest, range, or mine soils by adding a high carbon product. Biochar...

Managers and scientists have long known that reforestation has many ecological, economic, and cultural benefits. But reforestation isn’t as simple as planting trees. It means planting the right trees, in the right place, at the right time - or it may mean not planting at all.

Water is a precious resource in dryland regions of the western United States, including the Great Basin. Determining appropriate management strategies for stream and riparian ecosystems is challenging because Great Basin watersheds, stream systems, and associated riparian ecosystems have varying geomorphic and hydrologic conditions and support numerous different vegetation communities and animal species. These stream and riparian ecosystems show a wide variety of responses to both natural disturbances, such as floods, and human-caused disturbances, such as roads in the valley bottoms and...

Aircraft play vital roles in managing wildfire, but their use is both costly and inherently risky. On average, USDA Forest Service aviation costs represent 30 percent of annual firefighting expenditures. And despite improvements in airworthiness and safety in the last decade, aviation-related accidents represented the highest category of federal firefighter fatalities. To improve strategic risk management of firefighting aircraft, Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) ecologist Crystal Stonesifer and colleagues have recently developed and published a decision support system called the...

Wildfire size is increasing and so is the erosion potential, especially within intensified fire environments. Fires such as the record-breaking Colorado Cameron Peak Fire in 2020 are so large, and burn so hot, there is very little, if any vegetation left behind. The soil is left vulnerable and exposed to weather events. Extreme flooding events followed Cameron with a vengeance, causing destruction to natural and manmade features in the Poudre River Corridor, just west of Fort Collins, CO. Erosion increases sediment and wildfire ash in waterways and can cause hazards to people, property,...

Scientists are seeing an increase in cases where forest resilience is pushed beyond a breaking point. Within the last few decades, wildfires in the western United States have increasingly burned so severely that some forests are unlikely to return to their prefire state and may convert to different forest types or even to nonforested systems like grassland or shrubland.

For most of the 20th century, a primary objective of forest operations on federal public lands was supplying green timber to the forest products industry for manufacturing lumber and other forest products. Harvest operations and supply chain logistics were designed to handle this green timber with methods that maximized both efficiency and productivity with an eye on revenues.