Scaling post-fire effects from hillslopes to watersheds: processes, problems, and implications

Abstract

Over the last two decades we have made considerable progress on understanding and predicting the effects of wildfires on runoff and erosion at the hillslope scale. One cannot, however, sum up the hillslope-scale effects to predict what happens downstream because of the scale-dependent changes in the driving variables and controlling processes; yet resource managers need an understanding and predictive capability to assess post-fire risks at watershed scales, and to prioritize post-fire treatments among watersheds and fires. As watershed size continues to increase the risks of downstream post-fire flooding should rapidly diminish for several reasons. An explicit identification of the physical processes and how they change across different spatial scales is essential for post-fire management.

Citation

MacDonald, Lee; Brogan, Daniel; Nelson, Peter; Kampf, Stephannie; Wagenbrenner, Joseph. 2019. Scaling post-fire effects from hillslopes to watersheds: processes, problems, and implications. Proceedings of the 4th Joint Federal Interagency Sedimentation and Hydrologic Modeling Conference, Reno, NV. 6 pp.