Treesearch

The Blue Mountains ecoregion of eastern Oregon, encompassing the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa–Whitman National Forests, faces escalating wildfire risk driven by historical fire exclusion and fuel accumulation. This study integrates spatially explicit fuel reduction and restoration treatment planning with mass timber production to simultaneously enhance fire resilience and stimulate rural economic development. Using TreeMap 2022 data and potential operational delineations, we found that 69% of forests exceed fire-resilient desired future conditions, with 31% prioritized as potential...

Human actions, whether deliberate (e.g., fire suppression) or indeliberate (e.g., anthropogenic climate change), have and will continue to detrimentally impact wilderness ecosystems. These human-induced stressors are significantly degrading and even imperil the natural qualities of many wilderness areas (see Shive et al. 2026 ). Yet contemporary wilderness management philosophies, which arose in an era that predated rapid and ubiquitous environmental stressors such as climate change, may limit our ability to protect the natural conditions of these places.

Original publication:...

The rising frequency of large-scale, destructive wildfires has significantly affected not only natural ecosystems but also critical infrastructure, human lives, and properties. Given the devastating and often irreversible environmental and financial consequences, researchers from diverse fields are actively seeking solutions to improve resilience against wildfires. Fire suppression, one of the most effective strategies to mitigate wildfire damage, relies heavily on rapid and high-fidelity forecasting of fire spread. These predictions are essential for planning evacuations by state or local...

Historically, models and systems for fuels management have been developed independently without a great deal of coordination, leading to varying degrees of overlapping functionality. Additionally, as Gail Wells noted in the December 2009 issue of Fire Science Digest, the onus of reviewing, selecting, and using a specific tool often falls on the fire manager. To increase efficiency, reduce redundancies, and make the tool-selection process easier for fire managers, a solution was needed that incorporated several fuels management tools in one framework. The Joint Fire Science Program, a...

Managing ecosystems in an era of rapid change is inherently challenging not only because of uncertainty in future climate but also due to diverse responses of ecosystems to climate. Projections of ecological transformation alongside information about plausible vegetation trajectories can help land managers explore divergent scenarios and consider how modeled outcomes match their observations. Climate‐analog impact models (AIMs) compare environmental information (e.g., vegetation types) between sets of climatically similar locations to infer change and can be used to identify multiple...

Wildfire activity in the Southeastern United States is shaped by unique ecological and climatic conditions that differ markedly from those in other regions of the country. Despite increasing recognition of fire’s ecological importance and rising risks under climate change, regional-scale projections of wildfire behavior in the Southeast remain limited. In this study, we applied the Large Fire Simulator (FSim), a stochastic, spatially explicit fire behavior model, to simulate ignition, spread, suppression, and containment of wildfires within a Florida flatwoods pyrome under both historical...

Horizontally continuous fuel types such as pine litter can sustain flame spread along individual fuel particles, but little is known about how wind affects flame behavior at this fine scale.We conducted experiments to examine flame spread rates along thin horizontal fuel particles (cardboard and pine needles) where wind speed and particle orientation relative to wind direction were varied.The wind speed was controlled by mounting a fuel sample on a rotating disk turning at a specified rate.Video measurements showed that flame spread rates on fuel samples varied with fuel orientation angle...

The ignition of small fuel elements plays a crucial role in fire propagation. These fine fuels are often the first to ignite and serve as a bridge for fire spread to larger scenarios. The moisture content of these fuels significantly affects their flammability and thermal behaviour. In this study, the effect of fuel moisture content (FMC) and orientation on the drying, pyrolysis, ignition, and thermal processes of a cellulose solid fuel is investigated through a series of numerical simulations. In addition, experimental ignition-time measurements were conducted at the U.S. Forest Service...

Crib fires are a way to produce fires with higher repeatability than generally is the case for wildland and urban scenarios and consequently are used to study fire behavior. Models for simulating large-scale fires benefit from characterization against relevant test conditions. Here we describe a modeling and experimental effort to better explore fire dynamics at the larger range of what is achievable in laboratories. The modeling that corresponds to the tests is used to provide parameters to larger-scale transport modeling efforts for climate effects as well as to evaluate modeling under...

Wildfires have increasingly affected human and natural systems across the western United States (WUS) in recent decades. Given that the majority of ignitions are human‐caused and potentially preventable, improving the ability to predict fire occurrence is critical for effective wildfire prevention and risk mitigation. We used over 500,000 wildfire ignition records from 2000 to 2020 to develop machine learning models that predict daily ignition probability across the WUS and incorporate a wide range of physical, biological, social, and administrative variables. A key innovation of this work...