Treesearch

In recent years, the field of wildfire risk management has seen dramatic advances. One notable improvement is in the realm of pre-fire suppression response planning, in particular the expansion from the assessment of risks posed by fire to the assessment of opportunities to effectively manage fire. Such proactive assessment and planning is critical to ensure that suppression response strategies and tactics are more likely to be safe and efficient. In this paper we will review the state-of-the-art in wildfire suppression planning, and illustrate application of advanced planning tools on a...

Climate change is increasing the intensity of severe tropical storms and cyclones (also referred to as hurricanes or typhoons), with major implications for tropical forest structure and function. These changes in disturbance regime are likely to play an important role in regulating ecosystem carbon (C) and nutrient dynamics in tropical and subtropical forests. Canopy opening and debris deposition resulting from severe storms have complex and interacting effects on ecosystem biogeochemistry. Disentangling these complex effects will be critical to better understand the long-term implications...

Data uncertainty due to spatial gaps and heterogeneity is a fundamental problem in conservation and environmental planning. Thus, investigation of issues related to data uncertainty contributes to more efficient conservation plans. We evaluated the uncertainty of data related to forest diversity descriptors using a diffusionbased cartogram approach that visually displays how data information change in function with respect to degree of uncertainty. We used ground vegetation data for 3093 plots collected as part of the BioSoil project through the ICP Forests Level I network and stored in...

Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for...

Few ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) have survived the initial devastation that emerald ash borer beetle (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis) has caused in natural populations. We studied green ash (Fraxinus planipennis) trees in a floodplain population after >90% of ash had died from EAB infestation. We examined the relationship among the canopy health classes of surviving ash trees and their nearest neighboring trees (within 6 m) and available soil nutrients. A subset of focal ash trees was randomly selected within health classes ranging from healthy to recently deceased. Focal trees with the healthiest...

En Colorado, los bosques secos de coníferas mixtas de la Cordillera frontal han sufrido un cambio radical. A mediados de los 1800, los bosques de la Cordillera frontal eran más abiertos y herbáceos, y los rodales eran de dos a tres veces menos densos. Había árboles de todas las clases de tamaño en una disposición “agrupada”, en la que los grupos de árboles estaban separados por aperturas de un acre o menos. A nivel del paisaje, existía un rico mosaico paisajístico con bosques maduros de edad desigual mantenidos por incendios de baja gravedad, entremezclados con parches de bosque de...

Live fuel, on average, was the most important factor driving high-severity fire in and among ecoregions. Fire weather was the second most important factor, followed by climate and topography. Recently published ecoregional wall-to-wall gridded maps, based on satellite imagery that characterizes live fuel, are available to help land managers in the western United States identify areas with a high probability of high-severity fire.

Understanding the linkage between decreasing wetting rain days and increased risk of wildfires will enable fuels managers and forest managers to better anticipate wildfire severity and where wildfires may occur. The number of wetting rain days (WRDs) is expected to decrease throughout the West, which could lead to more burned acres. TopoFire, a drought and wildfire danger monitoring system for the conterminous United States, now includes a wetting rain day dataset. https://topofire.dbs.umt.edu/ topofire_v3/index.php.

Burned low-elevation sagebrush sites can be seeded with mixes of native grasses, forbs and shrubs using rangeland drills adapted for seeding large and small seeds in separate rows. Seeding technique, timing of seed application, and seeding rate are important considerations when seeding Wyoming big sagebrush.

Historical stand reconstruction shows that the ponderosa and dry mixed-conifer forests of Colorado’s Front Range were more open and grassy than they are today, with a very variable mix of tree sizes that were often clumped together. Much of the Front Range is characterized by a mixed-severity fire regime, with low, moderate, and high-severity fire effects all having occurred historically, based on factors such as elevation and slope.