Treesearch

The Great Basin floristic region spans three Level III ecoregions (Central Basin and Range, Northern Basin and Range, and Snake River Plain) and makes up a large portion of the Intermountain West of the United States. Over 75% of the Great Basin is publicly owned and managed by the US federal land management agencies, with state agencies also managing large areas. The primary human uses of public lands are grazing and recreation, with mining and oil and gas development found in some locations. The Great Basin has a range of mostly arid and semi-arid ecosystems from salt desert through...

The risk of destructive wildfire on fire-prone landscapes with excessive fuel buildup has prompted the use of fuel reduction treatments to protect valued resources from wildfire damage. The question of how to maximize the effectiveness of fuel reduction treatments at landscape scales is important because treating an entire landscape may be undesirable or unfeasible. We reviewed 86 simulation studies that examined landscape-scale fuel reduction treatment effectiveness for landscapes of the USA or Canada. Each of these studies tested effects of fuel reduction treatments on wildfire through...

By all measures, wildfires in the western United States are becoming more extreme. Fires are growing larger and burning more intensely, and suppression costs are spiraling upward. Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at the landscape scale is key given limited resources and the inability to treat all areas likely to burn in a wildfire.

This paper describes a dataset mined from the public archive (1999-2020) of the US National Incident Management System Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) forms (a total of 187,160 reports for 35,170 incidents, including 34,478 wildland fires). This system captures detailed daily/regular information on incident development and response, including social and economic impacts. Most (98.4%) reports are wildland fire-related, with other incident types including hurricane, hazardous materials, flood, tornado, search and rescue, civil unrest, and winter storms. The archive, although publicly...

Noxious weeds plague farmers and ranchers, push out native species, and cause both economic and ecological damage. Synthetic herbicides, developed in the 1940s, are often used to control the spread of these plants. By the late 1950s, scientists noticed that some herbicides were no longer effective on certain plant species, even after a typically lethal dose. Since then, scientists have worked to understand the plant traits and management actions that lead to herbicide resistance. This work is especially important as land managers attempt to eradicate plants legally deemed "noxious" and...

En las semanas posteriores al incendio en Cedar Creek en el 2022, se movilizó un equipo de Respuesta de Emergencia en Áreas Quemadas (Interagency Burned Area Emergency Response, BAER) para identificar y mitigar los riesgos para la vida y la seguridad humanas y los recursos hídricos críticos en las comunidades circundantes, incluida Oakridge, Oregón. Durante su evaluación, el equipo de BAER utilizó una guía de campo desarrollada por la Estación de Investigación de Rocky Mountain para elaborar un mapa de la severidad de los suelos quemados e identificar áreas propensas a una erosión más...

Wildfires generate significant amounts of ash and burned soils that can leach altered dissolved organic matter (DOM) to watersheds. In this work, we analyzed the absorbance and fluorescence spectrum of DOM leached from 40 ash and soil samples collected from two conifer forest burn scars. DOM fluorescence quantum yield at 350 nm (ϕf350) was elevated in all ash and burned soil leachates. Wildfire DOM fluorescence was also consistently shifted toward the ultraviolet (UV) region relative to unburned materials, which limited the utility of several pre-defined optical indices, such as the...

Purple milkvetch occurs in a variety of grassland, shrubland, and forest vegetation types. It is often associated with depressional or poorly drained areas where water collects or persists at least early in the growing season (Barr 2015). Throughout its range, it is found in partially moist, shady sites (Hermann 1966) such as meadows, water edges, and cool, brushy slopes (Barneby 1989; Spellenberg 2001; Fox et al. 2010). It is considered infrequent to locally common in prairies, meadows, thickets, open woodlands, and along roadsides and lake and stream margins (Stubbendieck and Milby 2021).

Increased water scarcity and drought frequency are creating water management challenges for many communities in the western U.S. In response, the Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors sponsored a virtual summit in August 2020 to develop a framework for identifying and addressing the most pressing water issues in the western United States (the West). Summit attendees were research scientists, university extension specialists and professionals, and federal/state agency representatives with knowledge and expertise of water management in the West. The summit elicited...

In wildland-urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility....