Treesearch

Background: Prescribed fire is a critical tool for managers of dry fire-prone forests used to create more fire resilient forests, improve wildlife habitat and increase understory diversity. However, there are still knowledge gaps around how to apply fire to achieve and balance desired conditions, such as how the forest understory responds to frequency of burning. We leveraged a unique long-term prescribed burn experiment and evaluated the responses of different understory vegetation components to differing fire return intervals (5-, 10-, 20-year) including two common shrub species of...

Fire modeling is a key prescribed fire planning tool, but there are limited operational tools for integrating models of forest change and fire behavior.We sought to integrate a forest succession model, LANDIS-II, with a fire behavior model, QUIC-Fire, into a workflow for assessing fire behavior in projected future fuel conditions.Using aboveground biomass, we matched LANDIS-II data to cohorts of trees in Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data by predicting tree age using Random Forest modeling. We then used tree attributes from FIA to create three-dimensional QUIC-Fire inputs representing...

Energy exchange in the fire environment is highly influenced by the heterogeneous and dynamic coupling between the atmosphere, fire, and fuels. While it has long been known that radiation and convection are the dominant heat transfer mechanisms in wildfire spread, much is unknown about their relative contribution. This is largely due to significant challenges observing these processes in the extreme wildfire environment. We describe a low cost, easy to deploy, simple heat transfer sensor and associated model, which was developed to measure heat transfer in wildfire. The sensor consists of...

Forest and wildfire management in the 21 century requires working across jurisdictional boundaries and with various land management entities. One important group includes Native American tribes, sovereign nations with unique legal and political standings who possess deeply rooted, intergenerational knowledge of ecological processes and landscape dynamics. This research seeks to learn from and engage with existing landscape-scale efforts where tribes are leading the way in cross-boundary ecosystem collaboration. In this paper, we synthesize recent field experiences and identify emergent...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Arkansas. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Greece is facing a wildfire crisis that parallels many other countries in fire-prone regions around the globe. Recent wildfire data for Greece point to an alarming trend of increasing fire size and severity catalyzed by climate change, lack of forest and fuel management, urban expansion into wildlands around major population centers, and rural exodus from areas that traditionally supported fire-resilient land uses. Fire management in Greece has long emphasized suppression with relatively little attention to prevention and coordination. In this paper, we identify key factors that are...

The unprecedented 2022 wildfire season in Navarra, northern Spain, marked a turning point in regional wildfire management, when seven simultaneous large fires during a June heatwave burned more than 17,000 ha in just a few days, overwhelming suppression capacity and highlighting the limits of a strategy based primarily on ignition prevention and fire suppression. In this study, we implemented a stochastic wildfire modeling system based on the Minimum Travel Time algorithm, historical ignition patterns, spatial fuel data, and spatiotemporal weather variability to assess community and...

A relatively small number of rapidly spreading wildfire events burn disproportionately large areas. But beyond area burned, do fast fires produce distinct postfire ecological outcomes? Here, we measure daily linear fire growth rates and assess relationships between fire spread, burn severity, and metrics of postfire landscape resilience from 3499 fires occurring between 2012 and 2023 in conifer-dominated forests of Canada and the western US. We find that as linear spread rate increases, so too does fire severity, proportion of area burned at high severity, and distance to surviving live...

Background: Changes in climate and vegetation, in combination with fire exclusion, are altering and homogenizing fire regime attributes compared to historical conditions. Fire regime changes are commonly quantified using departure metrics based on differences in measures of central tendency (i.e., means) between time periods. These metrics can mischaracterize complex changes to fire regime attributes because the distributions underlying these attributes are often not well described by parameters.

Results: We developed a non-parametric index of fire regime departure that quantifies...

A condition assessment of several glued-aminated timbers recently removed from service was conducted on the ends of the timbers using stress wave nondestructive evaluation techniques. After the assessment, toughness tests were performed in the laboratory on specimens obtained from the timbers to determine residual strength. Several areas of deterioration from decay were found during the nondestructive assessment. Deterioration was verified during subsequent toughness testing. A statistical relationship was found to exist between nondestructive test measurements and toughness test results.