Treesearch

Large wildfire events (e.g.>100 square km) highlight the importance of governance systems that address wildfire risk at landscape scales and among multiple land owners and institutions. A growing body of empirical work demonstrates that environmental governance outcomes depend upon how well patterns of interaction among actors align with patterns of ecological connectivity, such as wildfire transmission. However, the factors that facilitate or inhibit this alignment remain poorly understood. It is crucial to improve understanding of the conditions under which actors establish or maintain...

Western U.S. wildfire area burned has increased dramatically over the last half-century. How contemporary extent and severity of wildfires compare to the pre-settlement patterns to which ecosystems are adapted is debated. We compared large wildfires in Pacific Northwest forests from 1984 to 2015 to modeled historic fire regimes. Despite late twentieth-century increases in area burned, we show that Pacific Northwest forests have experienced an order of magnitude less fire over 32 yr than expected under historic fire regimes. Within fires that have burned, severity distributions are disconnec...

In this paper we investigate spatial-temporal associations of fire weather danger and fire regime features from 1979 to 2013. We analyze monthly time series of fire activity (number of fires and burned area) and fire weather danger rating indices (Fire Weather Index, Burning Index and Forest Fire Danger Index) at two spatial scales: (i) regionally, splitting the Spanish mainland into Northwest, Hinterland and Mediterranean regions; and (ii) locally, using the EMCWF grid. All analyses are based on decomposing time series to retrieve differential indicators of seasonal cycles, temporal...

Climate change and associated ecological impacts have challenged many conventional, observation-based approaches for predicting ecosystem and landscape responses to natural resource management. Complex spatial ecological models provide powerful, flexible tools which managers and others can use to make inferences about management impacts on future, no-analog landscape conditions. However, land managers who wish to use ecosystem and landscape models for natural resource applications are faced with the difficult task of deciding among many models that differ in important ways. Here, we...

This paper examines the issue of radionuclide resuspension from wildland fires in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion in 1986. This work originated from a scientific exchange among scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Ukraine and Belarus that was organized to assess science and technology gaps related to wildfire risk management. A wildfire risk modeling system was developed to predict likely hotspots for large fires and where wildfire ignitions will most likely result in significant radionuclide (Cesium, 137Cs) resuspension. The system was also designed...

Southern European countries rely largely on fire suppression and ignition prevention to manage a growing wildfire problem. We explored a more wholistic, long-term approach based on priority maps for the implementation of diverse management options aimed at creating fire resilient landscapes, restoring cultural fire regimes, facilitating safe and efficient fire response, and creating fire-adapted communities. To illustrate this new comprehensive strategy for fire-prone Mediterranean areas, we developed and implemented the framework in Catalonia (northeastern Spain). We first used advanced...

Predicting the efficacy of fuel treatments aimed at reducing high severity fire in dry-mixed conifer forests in the western US is a challenging problem that has been addressed in a variety of ways using both field observations and wildfire simulation models. One way to describe the efficacy of fuel treatments is to quantify how often wildfires are expected to intersect areas prioritized for treatment. In real landscapes treatments are static, restricted to a small portion of the landscape and against a background of stochastic fire and dynamic vegetation, thus the likelihood of fire...

Predicting wildfire disasters presents a major challenge to the field of risk science, especially when fires propagate long distances through diverse fuel types and complex terrain. A good example is in the western US where large tracts of public lands routinely experience large fires that spread from remote wildlands into developed areas and cause structure loss and fatalities. In this paper we provide the first comprehensive assessment of where public wildlands potentially contribute wildfire exposure to communities in the 11 western US states. We used simulation modeling to map and...

USDA Forest Service National Forest System (NFS) in the Southern Region provides oversight for the management of approximately 800,000 acres of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) and 1,440,000 acres of shortleafpine (Pinus echinata Mill.). About 97% of the longleafpine ecosystem and 53% of the shortlea'.f pine ecosystem have been lost over the past century.

An exotic insect is decimating populations of the two hemlock species native to the eastern United States, eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), a widespread and ecologically impo1iant tree species, and Carolina hemlock (T. caroliniana), a rare species endemic to the Southern Appalachian Mountains.