Treesearch

This study provides a framework for assessing the social and environmental benefits and public education outcomes associated with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management’s Community Assistance and Hazardous Fuel Programs in California. Evaluations of fire hazard mitigation programs tend to focus primarily on the number of acres treated and treatment costs associated with mitigation without adequately assessing the benefits of these treatments. While some evaluations account for the value of protected structures or the avoided costs of suppression, few account for the...

This case study illustrates the positive effects of strategic fuels treatments in continuous heavy fuels. In 1999, a severe windstorm blew down close to 1,000 square miles of forest land in northern Minnesota and Canada. As much as 400,000 acres of the blowdown occurred in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Fire experts were invited to assess the hazardous fuels problem and to design and implement a treatment strategy that would effectively slow the spread of wildland fires and reduce the threat of a wildfire moving out of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and into...

A Lightning Ignition Efficiency map was added to the suite of daily maps offered by the Wildland Fire Assessment System (WFAS) in 1999. This map computes a lightning probability of ignition (POI) based on the estimated fuel type, fuel depth, and 100-hour fuel moisture interpolated from the Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) network. An attempt to verify the efficiency map was made using cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning discharge data acquired at the Missoula Fire Lab (through the Vaisala Corporation network), lightning fire location data from within USDA Forest Service (FS) Region 1...

Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) is a nonprofit organization promoting safe, ethical, ecological wildland fire management. FUSEE believes firefighter and community safety are ultimately interdependent with ethical public service, wildlands protection, and ecological restoration of fire-adapted ecosystems. Our members include current, former, and retired wildland firefighters, other fire management specialists, fire scientists and educators, forest conservationists, and other citizens who support FUSEE’s holistic fire management vision. FUSEE’s primary function is...

Community wildfire protection plans (CWPPs) are being developed and implemented in communities across the United States. In a series of case studies, researchers found that the process of developing a CWPP can lead to benefits beyond those associated with fuels reduction, including enhancing social networks, developing learning communities, and building community capacity.

Prescribed fire every 2 to 4 years is an important component of longleaf pine ecosystem restoration. Under some circumstances, repeated fire could change soil physical properties on the Western Gulf Coastal Plain. The objective of this study was to evaluate the soil bulk density, porosity fractions, and plant-available water holding capacity of restored longleaf pine on the Western Gulf Coastal Plain in response to two vegetation management alternatives that included the application of three prescribed fires over a 6-year period. Soil microporosity and plant-available water holding...

Oak savanna woodlands were once a dominant ecotone throughout the upper Midwest. These ecosystems represented a transitional zone between prairie communities to the west that eventually graded into Big Woods forest. Most of the oak savanna landscapes of most of the Midwest were extensively homesteaded and farmed during the middle 1800s and few intact savanna landscapes remain today. Given the current interest in preserving, maintaining, and restoring these systems, it is imperative that the natural factors that have shaped these areas are investigated. This research investigates the...

Most wildfire education programs have relied overwhelmingly on homeowner information and education, limiting the role of such business professionals as architects, builders, insurance agents, landscape architects and contractors, planners, media, and realtors. This project was undertaken to engage and educate professionals who design landscapes and homes, work for home and property owners, and make decisions that affect homeowners and communities--and in the long run, to change best management practices in these industries. Market surveys for the target professions were conducted at the...

Fire behavior characteristics (such as temperature, radiant and total heat flux, 2- and 3-dimensional velocities, and air flow) are extremely difficult to measure insitu. Although insitu sensor packages are capable of such measurements in realtime, it is also essential to acquire video documentation as a means of better understanding the fire behavior data recorded by individual fire behavior sensor packages. Therefore, coupling each sensor pack with a digital video recorder for simultaneous recording of video and insitu measurements allows viewing of the fire behavior as flames approach,...

Frequent (1 to 5 year) low intensity fire regimes of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) savannas of the Southeastern United States create a continuous fuelbed of understory grasses, forbs, flammable pine needle litter, with interstitial hardwood shrubs. Measuring the spatial heterogeneity of these fine-fuels can be difficult, requiring intensive field sampling. Ground-based LIDAR (LIght Detection and Ranging) may prove useful in this aspect, collecting accurate three-dimensional point-clouds of objects at the sub-centimeter level. Here we present the methods and discuss the applicability of...