Treesearch

Fuels treatments have long mattered, and are expected to into the future. Mangers are trying desperately to quantitatively answer the question "How much of the risk of wildfire to key values is being reduced through fuels management programs?" Serious challenges to continued implementation of fuels treatments persist, such as lack of sufficient resources to accomplish meaningful risk reduction, where to apply those limited resources, how fuels programs contributed to the goals of the Cohesive Strategy, what level of wildfire intensity are treatments designed to mitigate, and can fuels...

This extended abstract describes the preliminary results of a study that sought to determine the most effective ways to develop and apply scientific information about resilience for on-the-ground management. Interviews were conducted with scientists, managers, and other stakeholders in the Southwest U.S. following a workshop on ecosystem resilience held in Tucson, Arizona in February 2014. The interviews asked respondents to consider how useful current scientific information is for decision-making, what research or products are most needed, how scientists and managers can most effectively...

Understanding what determines area burned in large landscapes is critical for informing wildland fire management in fire-prone environments and for representing fire activity in Dynamic Global Vegetation Models. For the past ten years, a group of landscape-fire modellers have been exploring the relative influence of key determinants of area burned in temperate and boreal forested landscapes using a suite of landscape-scale fire models from around the world. Three major simulation comparisons have been completed thus far, each incorporating five models and examining several different...

A quantitative measure of wildfire risk across a landscape - expected net change in value of resources and assets exposed to wildfire - was established nearly a decade ago. Assessments made using that measure have been completed at spatial extents ranging from an individual county to the continental United States. The science of wildfire risk assessment and management continues to build on the basic framework to develop new analysis techniques that address specific fire management problems. This paper reviews central concepts of the basic risk assessment framework and describes several...

The idea that more wildfires should be allowed to burn for resource benefit is widespread in federal fire management in the United States and the research community is heavily invested in strategies, tools, data, and information to provide decision-making support for these fires. In the context of the very large wildfires that are now occurring with frequency, it is generally believed that previous fires will confer benefit when large fires threaten. This paper examines whether federal fire management policies and practices in the United States are evolving to support more extensive use of...

Fire severity classifications are used in the post-fire environment to describe fire effects, such as soil alteration or fuel consumption, on the forest floor. Most of the developed classifications are limited because they address very specific fire effects or post-burn characteristics in the burned environment. However, because fire effects vary so much among soil, hydrology, vegetation, chemistry, particulate, and spatial distribution, it is important to realize that the impressions of burn severity are governed by the method used to classify the fire effects. The objective of this study...

Fire is an important driver in ecosystem evolution, composition, structure and distribution, and is vital for maintaining ecosystems of the Great Sandy Region (GSR). Charcoal records for the area dating back over 40, 000 years provide evidence of the great changes in vegetation composition, distribution and abundance in the region over time as a result of fire. Fires have shaped landscapes and ecosystems, creating fire-dependencies and fire disturbance-adapted flora and fauna with traits to survive fire, such as resprouting post-fire and serotiny of cones and fruit. However such traits are...

The Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC) is a composite departure measure that compares current vegetation structure and fire regime to historical reference conditions. FRCC is computed as the average of: 1) Vegetation departure (VDEP) and 2) Regime (frequency and severity) departure (RDEP). In addition to the FRCC rating, the Vegetation Condition Class (VCC) and Regime Condition Class (RCC) are produced to indicate the status of each. FRCC assessments are applied as ecological condition measures across the U.S. for land and fire management plans, National Environmental Policy Act documents,...

This presentation recapitulates the main points made at a technology and information transfer workshop held in advance of the conference that provided overviews of two software applications, developed by the authors, for use in assessing crown fire behavior and canopy fuel characteristics. These are the Crown Fire Initiation and Spread (CFIS) software system and the Canopy Fuel Stratum Characteristics Calculator. Both of these application tools are based on model formulations and performance evaluations that have appeared in the scientific peer-reviewed literature.

Historically, frequent, low-severity fires maintained opengrown structure of dry ponderosa pine forests (Hessburg and Agee 2003). Thus, an open forest structure may be a reasonable template for ecological restoration in those particular forest types (Allen and others 2002). In contrast, setting goals for ecosystem management and restoration targets in the vast majority of forests that are typified by mixed-severity fire, where forest structure historically varied across time and space, has proven more difficult (Halofsky and others 2011; Perry and others 2011).