Treesearch

Research conducted via the Australian Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (BCRC) developed methods for assessing postfire hydrologic risk to human life, infrastructure, and water quality. End users of BCRC products identified the project for utilization, and a small team of practitioners and researchers was established. The utilization team developed a three-phase plan. Phase one was an Australia-wide assessment of postfire hydrologic risk and the development of national guidelines based on general principles. Phase two was the application of the national risk guidelines to the water...

Prescribed burning is an essential tool for the management of fire. Burns can be complex and involve many variables that pose high levels of risk. Fire planners develop detailed plans to minimize risk, but risk will never be completely eliminated. Burn escapes and shrinking burn windows due to climate change have highlighted the need for a standardized tool to deal with the risks associated with prescribed burning. The Prescribed Burn Decision Support Tool (PB DST) is a risk assessment tool that assists practitioners in recognizing and documenting the risks associated with a prescribed...

In the 28-year period from 1990 to 2017, there were 41 incidents in the United States where firefighter burnover fatalities occurred on wildland fires. Ninety-six fatalities and 78 injuries were reported, with an average of 1.5 incidents and 3.4 fatalities per year. The great majority (76 percent) of fatalities occurred in mountainous terrain, where the most common situation was that fire personnel became trapped while working upslope or upcanyon from the fire when the fire made a sudden upslope run. The information for my report came primarily from serious accident investigations of...

A prescribed burn for western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) reduction at Crooked River National Grassland in Oregon was conducted in 2011. Foliar cover by species or genus and functional group was measured every other year for 6 years to evaluate response to four treatments: unburned control, burned, burned-plus-nativeseeding, and burned-plus-cultivar seeding. Additional measurements focused on expansion of medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) from localized patches and vegetative response to postburn grazing.

Fire is a natural environmental parameter on which the diversity of life depends. In the United States we are now engaged in sorting all remaining lands not already transformed from nature into two distinct categories of conservation. First are the lands we are committed to protect: National forests, national parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness, and other public lands, and private preserves. Second are the working landscapes found in ranches, small farms, and their woodlands, and some commercial timberlands. From the perspective of the planet, the most significant corollary of climate...

Support Vector Machines (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) are two common machine learning algorithms. Used for classifying images, the kNN and SVM each have strengths and weaknesses. When classifying an image, the SVM creates a hyperplane, dividing the input space between classes and classifying based upon which side of the hyperplane an unclassified object lands when placed in the input space. The kNN uses a system of voting to determine which class an unclassified object belongs to, considering the class of the nearest neighbors in the decision space. The SVM is extremely fast, classifyi...

Studies on frequent fire return intervals often span a few years and historically it has been presumed that this is sufficient to assess fire effects in different seasons and/ or frequencies. However, long-term data increasingly challenges this assumption. Our research targets an ecosystem dominated by the fire-dependent longleaf pine (Pinus palustris). Longleaf pine forests once dominated Southeastern United States uplands and it is well-accepted that the ecosystem was maintained by frequent fire. Nevertheless, important questions remain, including how frequent is frequent enough and how...

The Frye Fire started June 7, 2017, in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeast Arizona. The Pinaleños are host to important resources and assets including Mount Graham International Observatory, recreation residences, a church camp, Forest Service infrastructure, spiritual significance to tribes, and 11 endemic fish and wildlife species. This assessment was stimulated by the need to make sense of the numerous resources and assets within the planning area of the Frye Fire in order to enable quality dialog between the Coronado National Forest and the Incident Management Team. The assessment was...

Prescribed fire is a commonly used land management tool in the southeastern United States. Despite its use, there are several issues that are making land management difficult for private forest landowners. We focus on three of the issues. The first is the increased planting of longleaf pine when prescribed fire is withheld from these plantations for too long, allowing stands to fill in with other species. A second major issue is landowners with upland hardwood stands dominated by oaks. They want oaks but refuse to use fire that would aid in oak regeneration. The third issue is the use of...

Inclusivity and diversity are being increasingly recognized as important factors in the production of scientific knowledge, not only for the sake of equal opportunity, but as necessary to the best quality research (e.g. Feliú-Mójer et al 2018; Poster 2018; Smith et al 2018). However, lack of diversity persists in many if not all scientific fields to varying degrees (e.g. Pérez 2018; Poster 2018), and affects various facets of research and education including the underrepresentation of women in leadership at universities (Smaglik 2018; Hamburg et al. 2018), in the peer-review process...