Treesearch

The Interagency Native Plant Materials Development Program outlined in the 2002 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and United States Department of Interior (USDI) Report to Congress encouraged use of native plant materials for rangeland rehabilitation and restoration where feasible. The Great Basin Native Plant Project is a cooperative project lead by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Plant Conservation Program and the United States Forest Service (USFS), Rocky Mountain Research Station that was initiated to provide information that will be useful to managers when making...

Spatial and temporal environmental variability can lead to variation in selection pressures across a landscape. Strategies for coping with environmental heterogeneity range from specialized phenotypic responses to a narrow range of conditions to generalist strategies that function under a range of conditions. Here, we ask how mean climate and climate variation at individual sites and across a species’ range affect the specialist-generalist spectrum of germination strategies exhibited by 10 arid land forbs. We investigated these relationships using climate data for the western United...

Incident Management Teams (IMTs) combat the toughest wildfires in the United States, contending with forces of nature as well as many stakeholders with different agendas. Prior literature on IMTs suggested roles and cognitive sense-making as key elements for success, but the possible importance of emotional and social intelligence competencies in leadership has not been empirically explored. Sixty critical incidents from interviews of 15 incident commanders were analyzed for emotional and social intelligence competencies in incident management leadership. Seven competencies were found to...

Although communication is often cited as a contributor to organisational accidents, complexities of the communication context are still understudied. In training materials and some investigative reports, communication is often presented as an equipment issue or as a simple skill that can be picked up on the job. However, interviews with operational and managerial professionals in wildland firefighting reveal 10 simplifications in guidance about radio communication that do not match the complexities experienced by firefighters in the fire environment. Borrowing language from highreliability...

Wildland firefighters in the US are mandated to identify areas that provide adequate separation between themselves and the flames (i.e. safety zones) to reduce the risk of burn injury. This study presents empirical models that estimate the distance from flames that would result in a low probability (1 or 5%) of either fatal or non-fatal injuries. The significant variables for the fatal injury model were fire shelter use, slope steepness and flame height. The separation distances needed to ensure no more than a 1 or 5% probability of fatal injury, without the use of a fire shelter, for...

Wildland fire suppression practices in the western United States are being widely scrutinized by policymakers and scientists as costs escalate and large fires increasingly affect social and ecological values. One potential solution is to change current fire suppression tactics to intentionally increase the area burned under conditions when risks are acceptable to managers and fires can be used to achieve long-term restoration goals in fire adapted forests. We conducted experiments with the Envision landscape model to simulate increased levels of wildfire over a 50-year period on a 1.2...

Concern over the effects of removing fire-scarred partial cross-sections may limit sampling of live ponderosa pine to reconstruct fire history. We report mortality rates for ponderosa pine trees 20 to 21 years after removing fire-scarred partial cross-sections to reconstruct fire history. In 2015, following surveys every five years since 2000, we revisited 138 trees that were alive when we sectioned them in 1994/95 and 386 similarly sized, un-sectioned neighbor trees of the same species that were also alive in 1994/95. Between 1994/95 and 2015, a significantly greater proportion of...

This study presents a comprehensive review of estimated black carbon (BC) emissions in Russia from a range of studies. Russia has an important role regarding BC emissions given the extent of its territory above the Arctic Circle, where BC emissions have a particularly pronounced effect on the climate. We assess underlying methodologies and data sources for each major emissions source based on their level of detail, accuracy and extent to which they represent current conditions. We then present reference values for each major emissions source. In the case of flaring, the study presents new...

One of the major science gaps in U.S. wildfire policy is the lack of studies on the long-term benefits of hazardous fuel reduction and restoration programs. For instance, there is little information available to predict the impact of current fuel management and restoration on wildfire activity and whether these fuel reduction activities will meet expectations in terms of wildfire risk to social, ecological, and economic values on national forests. To address this gap, we built a new model that uses the Forest Vegetation Simulator Parallel Processing Extension and FSim large wildfire...

Wildfire mitigation in Pinyon-Juniper woodlands in the Colorado Plateau region is a management priority. Two wildfire mitigation treatments, mastication and thin-pile-burn, are often chosen based on costs and availability of equipment, yet there are ecological concerns with either treatment. Ecological outcomes from additions of low quality organic residues following mastication can potentially alter microbially mediated soil nitrogen availability, therefore we wished to evaluate the effects of the additions of low quality woody residues to the soil surface compared to thin-pile-burn...