Treesearch

In this article, we describe the design and development of a quantitative, geospatial risk assessment tool intended to facilitate monitoring trends in wildfire risk over time and to provide information useful in prioritizing fuels treatments and mitigation measures. The research effort is designed to develop, from a strategic view, a first approximation of how both fire likelihood and intensity influence risk to social, economic, and ecological values at regional and national scales. Three main components are required to generate wildfire risk outputs: (1) burn probability maps generated...

With the progression of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) towards a mainstream resource management tool, it has become necessary to understand how best to process and analyze the data. While most ground surface identification algorithms remain proprietary and have high purchase costs; a few are openly available, free to use, and are supported by published results. Two of the latter are the multiscale curvature classification and the Boise Center Aerospace Laboratory LiDAR (BCAL) algorithms. This study investigated the accuracy of these two algorithms (and a combination of the two) to...

Avoidance of injury and death on the fireline may depend on firefighters voicing their concerns, but often this does not occur. Reasons for employee reticence identified in the literature include a perception of various personal costs or a belief that raising concerns is futile. Additionally, the social context may play a significant role. In a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 36 wildland firefighters in the US, we explored reasons firefighters do or do not voice concerns. Findings revealed two primary themes related to initiating voice (limits to environmental perception...

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.), an invasive annual grass, is displacing native species and causing increased fire frequency in the Great Basin of the southwestern United States. Growth and nitrogen uptake patterns by cheatgrass were examined in a greenhouse study using soils from sites with the same soil type but different fire histories: 1) an area that burned in 1999 that is now completely invaded with cheatgrass (CG); 2) an area that has not burned recently and is now dominated by Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis Beetle and Young) and Sandberg's bluegrass...

Stream temperature regimes are of fundamental importance in understanding the patterns and processes in aquatic ecosystems, and inexpensive digital sensors provide accurate and repeated measurements of temperature. Most temperature measurements in mountain streams are made only during summer months because of logistical constraints associated with stream access and concerns that large annual floods will destroy sensor installations. We assessed six underwater epoxies to determine whether sensors could be attached to large rocks already in streams to provide durable installations and...

Recent ex-urban development within the wildland interface has significantly increased the complexity and associated cost of federal wildland fire management in the United States. Rapid identification of built structures relative to probable fire spread can help to reduce that complexity and improve the performance of incident management teams. Approximate structure locations can be mapped as specific-point building cluster features using cadastral data records. This study assesses the accuracy and precision of building clusters relative to GPS structure locations and compares these results...

Interviews of tribal and nontribal residents of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, U.S., were conducted to contrast the meanings that different cultures attach to the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness. Legislation that created a national system of wilderness areas (in 1964 and still growing) was conceived, supported, and enacted by a fairly distinct social group generally residing in urban areas and schooled in modern civilization's scientific model and relationship with nature. The places this legislation protects, however, provide many other poorly recognized and little...

Fire management faces important emergent issues in the coming years such as climate change, fire exclusion impacts, and wildland-urban development, so new, innovative means are needed to address these challenges. Field studies, while preferable and reliable, will be problematic because of the large time and space scales involved. Therefore, landscape simulation modeling will have more of a role in wildland fire management as field studies become untenable. This report details the design and algorithms of a complex, spatially explicit landscape fire and vegetation model called FireBGCv2....

Wildfire and debris flows are important physical and ecological drivers in headwater streams of western North America. Past research has primarily examined short-term effects of these disturbances; less is known about longer-term impacts. We investigated wildfire effects on the invertebrate prey base for drift-feeding rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss, Walbaum) in Idaho headwater streams a decade after wildfire. Three stream types with different disturbance histories were examined: 1) unburned, 2) burned, and 3) burned followed by debris flows that reset channel morphology and riparian...

Native plant materials centers across the United States create concentrated sources of native species seeds, cuttings, and plants that are readily available for use in restoration, landscaping, and other revegetation projects. In addition, these centers provide materials from local genetic sources that are adapted to the environmental conditions of the target site which makes them less likely to aggressively compete with, or decrease the genetic fitness of, extant native vegetation. Despite the increased desire to use native plant materials for re-vegetation, a general lack of information...