Historical fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Front Range, and recommendations for ecological restoration and fuels management

Abstract

At the request of The Nature Conservancy and the Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership, we are developing brief summaries of the current state of our scientific understanding of historical fire regimes in the forested landscapes of Colorado's Front Range. The area of interest extends from El Paso and Teller Counties, near Pikes Peak, to Larimer County and the Colorado-Wyoming border. This article focuses on forests in which ponderosa pine is a dominant or co-dominant species. A subsequent article will deal with forests of lodgepole pine, spruce, and fir. M. Kaufmann and T. Veblen have conducted extensive studies of ponderosa pine forest ecology in the southern Front Range (mainly the Cheesman Reservoir area) and the central Front Range (mainly in and around Boulder County), respectively. This research has led to substantial agreement about the historical role of fire in shaping these forests, and we emphasize these points of agreement in this article, in the section entitled "Things We Know with Relatively High Confidence." Some disagreements and uncertainties also have arisen, and we identify these as topics of high priority for future research, under the section entitled "Things We Think We Know -- BUT with Relatively Low Confidence." We close with a brief summary of the implications of the science for current efforts directed at fire hazard mitigation and ecological restoration in ponderosa pine forests of the Front Range.

Citation

Kaufmann, Merrill R.; Veblen, Thomas T.; Romme, William H. 2006. Historical fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Front Range, and recommendations for ecological restoration and fuels management. Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership Roundtable: Findings of the Ecology Workgroup. Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership. 14 p. Online: http://www.frftp.org/docs/pipo.pdf.