Treesearch

Fire is a dominant driver of ecosystem patterns and processes across the Rocky Mountains. This chapter describes fire ecology and fire-related management for the major forest types in the Rocky Mountains. Major forest types included are ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, mixed-conifer, lodgepole pine, spruce-fir, five-needle pines, and aspen. For each forest type we describe historical fire regimes, interactions between fire and other disturbances, departures from historical patterns, and projected future patterns. We explain fire resistance and postfire recovery patterns. We also include...

Forests in the southwestern USA are well adapted to dry conditions. High lightning incidence, long human habitation, and frequently windy conditions make the Southwest stand out for a high pace of burning. Forests are structured by climatic gradients created by elevation and topography. Low-elevation woodlands experience the driest conditions, but low productivity limits fuels. At the other extreme, high-elevation forests produce abundant fuels but are rarely dry enough to burn. The "sweet spot" in the middle elevations, dominated by pines and other mixed conifers, is characterized by...

Wildfire affects many types of communities and is a particular concern for communities in the wildland urban interface (WUI), such as Chalk Creek in Chaffee County. The core intent of this project was to provide evidence to support Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS) Salida Field Office’s wildfire mitigation and education program. This report analyzes existing wildfire risk data collected in late 2017 through 2019 and pairs it with social data collected in the summer of 2019, in order to better understand Chalk Creek residents’ knowledge, experiences, and perceptions about wildfire risk....

Dangerous wildfire conditions continue to threaten people and ecosystems across the globe and cooperation is critical to meeting the outsized need for increased prescribed burning in wildfire risk reduction work. Despite the benefits of using prescribed fire to mitigate wildfire risks, prescribed fire implementation is still challenging. Collaboration and capacity-building can help address policy and capacity barriers inhibiting prescribed fire. We conducted 53 interviews across four case studies in the western United States where federal land management agencies and cooperative actors are...

A census of endangered plant populations is critical to determining their size, spatial distribution, and geographical extent. Traditional, on-the-ground methods for collecting census data are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. Use of drone imagery coupled with application of rapidly advancing deep learning technology could greatly reduce the effort and cost of collecting and analyzing population-level data across relatively large areas. We used a customization of the YOLOv5 object detection model to identify and count individual dwarf bear poppy (Arctomecon humilis) plants in...

Process-based classification of rivers is widely used for assessing the effects of past landscape disturbance, current biophysical conditions, and likely responses to future disturbance, including land management and restoration activities. This article reviews the purposes of geomorphic channel classification, the different types of classifications that have been developed, their use, compatibility, and popularity (i.e., why some classifications are used more than others), and concludes with a look at future needs and directions for channel classification.

Nowadays forest fires are so rare in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and other floodplains of the southeastern USA that these floodplains appear fireproof. Fire was once much more common across the Southeastern Coastal Plain, including in these forested floodplains. Even so, fire was not the fundamental ecological disturbance in floodplain forests that it was in adjacent uplands; flooding served that role here. Other disturbances, like hurricanes, tornados, and beavers opened floodplain forests and may have been antecedents to fires. Since the arrival of Europeans, the disturbance regime...

The application of scientifically rigorous public engagement approaches is lacking. In this context, we present a “social vulnerability protocol” which has now been applied in several broad-scale planning efforts. The protocol aims to understand the multitude of relationships that people have with public land through a prioritization of ecosystem services and a selection of relevant drivers of change. The protocol is analytically rigorous and readily interpretable, and is clearly tied to the planning objectives of knowledge co-production, tradeoff analysis, and understanding how various...

Quantifying invasion severity of nonnative invasive plant species is vital for the development of appropriate mitigation and control measures. We examined more than 23,250 Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots from the southern coastal states of the United States to develop an alternative method to classify and map the invasion severity of Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera). Remeasured FIA plot-level data were used to examine the spatiotemporal changes in the presence probability and cover percentage of tallow. Four invasion severity classes were identified by using the product of...

This report provides a multiscale approach for assessing the geomorphic sensitivity of streams and ecological resilience of riparian ecosystems, including meadows, in upland watersheds of the Great Basin to disturbances and management actions. Part I describes the key concepts needed to understand geomorphic sensitivity, ecological resilience, and ecological integrity. The watershed characteristics and components that influence sensitivity and resilience to disturbance are discussed, including the geomorphic characteristics of the stream channels and vegetation characteristics of the...