Treesearch

Climate change will influence wildfire on private forest lands via two pathways: (1) changes in temperatures and precipitation will induce direct changes in wildfire likelihood and severity; and (2) changes in management by forest landowners seeking to adapt to climate change will result in shifts in species composition and harvest timing and intensity, which act as additional indirect influences on wildfire. We examined private forest landowners’ management behavior in the context of climate change and wildfire, to anticipate how forest landowners in California, Oregon, and Washington...

Quantifying fireline effectiveness (FLE) is essential to evaluate the efficiency of large wildfire management strategies to foster institutional learning and improvement in fire management organizations. FLE performance metrics for incident-level evaluation have been developed and applied to a small set of wildfires, but there is a need to understand how widely they vary across incidents to progress towards targets or standards for performance evaluation. Recent efforts to archive spatially explicit fireline records from large wildfires facilitate the application of these metrics to a...

Burn severity is the ecological change resulting from wildland fires. It is often mapped by using prefire and postfire satellite imagery and classified as low, moderate, or high. Areas burned with high severity are of particular concern to land managers and others because postfire vegetation, soil, and other important ecosystem components can be highly altered. In this study, we developed Random Forest statistical models describing the occurrence of high burn severity across the contiguous United States. We divided our work into 17 regions in the western United States and 8 regions in the...

We developed a new algorithm for COntinuous monitoring of Land Disturbance (COLD) using Landsat time series. COLD can detect many kinds of land disturbance continuously as new images are collected and provide historical land disturbance maps retrospectively. To better detect land disturbance, we tested different kinds of input data and explored many time series analysis techniques. We have several major observations as follows. First, time series of surface reflectance provides much better detection results than time series of Top-Of- Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance, and with some adjustments...

Recent years have witnessed a growing number of stories about extreme wildfires that have had significant social impacts, from Australia to Portugal to California. Although this has heightened the call to find ways to better “coexist with fire,” it must be recognized that wildfire-human interactions are as old as humanity itself. Humans around the world have ignited and used fire as a basic tool for millennia; people have and continue to use confined fires for a range of quotidian reasons including cooking, heating, and processing of materials (e.g., in the production of brick, ceramics,...

Recovery after a wildfire is a process, both at the community or larger scale and for individuals. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) defines recovery as, “The restoring or improving of livelihoods and health, as well as economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets, systems and activities, of a disaster-affected community or society, aligning with the principles of sustainable development and ‘build back better’, to avoid or reduce future disaster risk.” Despite the growing wildfire social science literature and increasing impacts of wildfires...

Fire is a natural process that has shaped the history of Earth long before human presence; imagining a “world without fires is like a sphere without roundness” ([1], p.599). Evidence that massive and intense fires naturally occurred throughout the Holocene [1e3] demonstrates that extreme wildfires events (EWEs) are not a recent reality. Although many ecosystems are resilient to such intense fires (e.g., in Yellowstone Park, within the first decade after the fire occurred in 1988, plant and animal communities were well on their way to their pre-fire composition; [3a]), recent tragic fires...

Severe wildfire can affect many soil processes, especially organic matter (OM) decomposition. Organic mulches are often applied on steep slopes to mitigate soil erosion, but little is known about how these surface organic additions affect subsequent soil OM decomposition. In 2003 the Cedar Fire burned 110,000 ha in southern California chaparral shrubland, after which hydromulch was aerially applied to reduce soil erosion. Subsequently, we established a 5-year study to assess the effect of hydromulch on OM decomposition at the burned soil surface and in the mineral soil using aspen (Populus...

Forest restoration thinning in Chinese pine (Pinus tabuliformis) plantations can alter stand structure and soil abiotic properties, which have the potential to change biotic properties such as wood-inhabiting fungal community structure. Therefore, three thinning treatments (30%, 41% and 53% of the standing biomass removed) and an unthinned control stand were established at stand age 35 to determine the effects on surface and mineral soil wood-inhabiting fungi. Chinese pine, loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), and trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) wood stakes were placed horizontally on the...

Small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) offer key benefits over manned aircraft and satellite platforms used for remote sensing research, such as high spatial resolution, portability, simplicity of implementing ground control, affordability, and lack of reliance upon third-party imagery providers. Mountainous areas, which we define as locations that are higher than 2500 m in elevation and that contain slopes greater than 25°, pose a number of challenges to sUAS mapping operations that other environments do not, including reduced aircraft performance, cold temperatures, high winds, and...