Treesearch

Postfire slope stabilization treatments are often prescribed following high‑severity wildfires on public lands to reduce erosion, maintain soil productivity, protect water quality, and reduce risks to human life and property. However, the effectiveness of slope stabilization treatments remains in question. For this study, tests were on effectiveness of seeding and fertilization treatments for increasing total live plant cover and reducing percent bare soil during the first 2 years following wildfire in dry mixed-conifer forests of north-central Washington State. Assessments were made on...

The Wildland Fire Assessment System (WFAS) is a component of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service Decision Support Systems (DSS) that support fire potential modeling. Fire potential models for Mississippi and for Eastern fire environments have been developed as part of a National Aeronautic and Space Agency-funded study aimed at demonstrating the utility of NASA assets in fire potential decision support systems. Climate, fuels, topography and ignition are recognized as important components for modeling fire potential in Eastern forests and grasslands. We produced temporal and...

This photograph handbook describes characteristics and burn severity of a dry forested and grassland mosaic that burned within the last decade. We show photographs of different burned and unburned sites to help compare fire occurrence in similar stands. The handbook provides local land managers with a quick, inexpensive, and efficient way to evaluate effects of prescribed fire, wildfire, or a combination of the two, based on current conditions of unburned sites. This handbook can be used as a communication, calibration, or monitoring tool. It also contains a CD (RMRS-RP-67) that documents...

Fire managers in the Coastal Plain of the Southeastern United States use prescribed burning as a tool to reduce fuel loads in a variety of vegetation types, many of which have elevated fuel loads due to a history of fire suppression. While standardized fuel models are useful in prescribed burn planning, those models do not quantify site-specific fuel loads that reflect land use change, natural disturbances, and previous management. Furthermore, data on the fuel consumed during prescribed burning are generally unavailable. In an effort to accurately measure and map fuel loading and consumpti...

On March 24, 1998, a crew of eight rural firefighters were burned over while attempting to suppress a backburning sector of the Bucklands Crossing Fire in North Otago, New Zealand. The fire demonstrates how factors typical of the New Zealand fire environment – steep slopes, highly flammable shrub fuels, and a strong foehn wind effect – combined to produce extreme fire behaviour. Several firefighters sustained varying degrees of injury. They were hit by a blowup that was most likely caused by a rapid reburn through previously underburned shrub fuels. The exact trigger for upslope spread and...

Ponderosa pine forests in the Eastern Cascades of Washington support dense, overstocked stands in which crown fires are probable, owing to postsettlement sheep grazing, logging, and fire exclusion. In 1991, the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forests began to apply long-term management techniques to reverse postsettlement changes in ponderosa pine forests. For 9 years, the effects of thinning and burning in a ponderosa pine/pinegrass forest were evaluated, using prescribed fire in fall 1997 in forest stands that had been thinned in 1996. Thinning and burning had little effect on the canopy...

In this study, the assignment and theoretical investigations of the problems of forest fire initiation were carried out, including development of a mathematical model for description of heat and mass transfer processes in overterrestrial layer of atmosphere at crown forest fire initiation, taking into account their mutual influence. Mathematical model of forest fire was based on an analysis of experimental data and using concept and methods from reactive media mechanics. In the context of the general mathematical model of forest fires, this study gives a new mathematical setting and method...

The fire behavior modeling described here, conducted as part of the Biomass to Energy (B2E) life cycle assessment, is funded by the California Energy Commission to evaluate the potential net benefits associated with treating and utilizing forest biomass. The B2E project facilitates economic, environmental, energy, and effectiveness assessments of the potential public benefits associated with: (1) various options for treatment, disposition, and utilization of forest biomass and (2) energy production from biomass produced by forest remediation activities. The study models forest conditions,...

The prediction of fire behavior is of vital importance to all fire management planning and decisionmaking processes including fire prevention, presuppression planning, and fire use. The effect of slope on fire behavior is well acknowledged, yet its effect on fire behavior is not well accounted for. Determining the effects of slope on fire behavior under field conditions can prove invaluable and will allow for the testing of earlier studies conducted under laboratory conditions and help increase the accuracy of fire behavior prediction models. The present study was carried out in Kesan...

Obtaining accurate biomass measurements is often a resource-intensive task. Data collection crews often spend large amounts of time in the field clipping, drying, and weighing grasses to calculate the biomass of a given vegetation type. Such a problem is currently occurring in the Great Plains region of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A study looked at six reservations in the Great Plains region to compare three methods of calculating aboveground dry weight biomass to determine the least resource-intensive method. Data were collected in the six agencies using a modified FIREMON plot layout...