Treesearch

What is an Integrated Sampling Strategy? Simply put, it is the strategy that guides how plots are put on the landscape. FIREMON’s Integrated Sampling Strategy assists fire managers as they design their fire monitoring project by answering questions such as: What statistical approach is appropriate for my sample design? How many plots can I afford? How many plots do I need? Where should I put my plots? What sampling methods should I use on my plots?The Integrated Sampling Strategy (ISS) is used to design fire monitoring sampling projects by selecting the most appropriate sampling approach...

Spatially continuous sampling designs, when temporally replicated, provide analytical flexibility and are unmatched in their ability to provide a dynamic system view. We have compiled such a data set by georeferencing the network-scale distribution of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) redds across a large wilderness basin (7330 km2) in central Idaho for 9 years (1995-2003). During this time, the population grew at a rate of 5.3 recruits per spawner, and redd numbers increased from 20 to 2271. As abundances increased, fish expanded into portions of the stream network that had...

Federal land managers and the public engage in many decisions about stewardship of wilderness in the United States, including decisions about stewardship of fire. To date, social science research lacks a holistic examination of the decision-making context of managers and the public about stewardship of fire inside wilderness and across its boundaries. A conceptual model is presented to guide research on this decision-making context, with emphasis placed on social influences on public and manager decision making.

Accurate spatial information on the location and extent of mountain pine beetle infestation is critical for the planning of mitigation and treatment activities. Areas of mixed forest and variable terrain present unique challenges for the detection and mapping of mountain pine beetle red-attack damage, as red-attack has a more heterogeneous distribution under these conditions. In this study, mountain pine beetle red-attack damage was detected and mapped using a logistic regression approach with a forward stepwise selection process and a set of calibration data representing samples of...

Volcanic mudflows are locally important disturbance agents in the Pacific Northwest rarely studied within the context of forest succession. We describe 18 years (1981–1999) of forest development on the Muddy River mudflow deposit following the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens using permanent plot data collected along two transects traversing the Cedar Flats river terrace. We analyze changing forest structure over the study period and compare results with mudflow deposition using correlation and pairwise comparisons, as well as ordination (detrended correspondence analysis) and cluster...

The Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Prototype Project, or LANDFIRE Prototype Project, required that the entire array of wildland fuel characteristics be mapped to provide fire and landscape managers with consistent baseline geo-spatial information to plan projects for hazardous fuel mitigation and to improve public and firefighter safety. Fuel maps were some of the core deliverables of the LANDFIRE Prototype Project. The LANDFIRE approach for mapping fuel combined information from the LANDFIRE reference database (LFRDB) (Caratti and others, Ch. 4), biophysical...

The relative behavior of surface-crown fire spread rate modeling systems used in three fire management applications-CFIS (Crown Fire Initiation and Spread), FlamMap and NEXUS- is compared using fire environment characteristics derived from a dataset of destructively measured canopy fuel and associated stand characteristics. Although the surface-crown modeling systems predict the same basic fire behavior characteristics (type of fire, spread rate) using the same basic fire environment characteristics, their results differ considerably. Across the range of inputs used in these comparisons,...

Recent evidence of amphibian declines along with outbreaks of large wildfires in western North American conifer forests has underscored our lack of knowledge about effects of fire on amphibians in these ecosystems. Understanding the connection between amphibian declines and wildfire is proving complex in some areas because the past century of fire suppression and other management activities have already altered amphibian habitats. For example, ponderosa pine forest types typically had low severity understory fires that likely maintained open habitats preferred by some amphibians. Fires in...

Our recent examination of bed load transport data from mountain gravel-bed rivers in the western United States shows that the data can be fit by a simple power function of discharge, with the coefficient being a function of drainage area (a surrogate for basin sediment supply) and the exponent being a function of supply-related channel armoring (transport capacity in excess of sediment supply) (Barry et al., 2004). We also compared the performance of our proposed equation to that of five commonly used bed load transport equations. Here, we explore the sensitivity of equation performance to...

The FIREMON database software allows users to enter data, store, analyze, and summarize plot data, photos, and related documents. The FIREMON database software consists of a Java application and a Microsoft® Access database. The Java application provides the user interface with FIREMON data through data entry forms, data summary reports, and other data management tools. The Microsoft Access database contains the tables that store the actual FIREMON data and the standard lookup codes used in various FIREMON fields.