Treesearch

Riparian areas are typically highly productive areas that sustain important socioecological benefits, including the capacity to modulate effects of watershed disturbances on aquatic systems. Recent studies have shown that fire behavior in riparian areas varies with landscape attributes. Smaller, headwater riparian areas often burn similarly to adjacent uplands, whereas riparian areas next to larger streams (4th order and higher) often burn less frequently and less severely because of moister microclimates, and therefore can serve as fire breaks within a landscape. However, other riparian...

Wet meadows help to sustain favorable water flows, biological diversity, and other values; consequently, restoration of degraded wet meadows is an important part of a strategy for promoting socioecological resilience. This chapter focuses on high-elevation wet meadows that are associated with streams; thus restoration of such meadows may be considered a subset of stream restoration. However, it is important to recognize that degradation of high-elevation meadows often reflects site-level impacts rather than watershed-scale impacts that degrade lower-elevation streams and rivers. For that...

Recent studies of historical fire regimes indicate that fires occurring prior to Euro-American settlement were characterized by a high degree of spatial complexity that was driven by heterogeneity in vegetation/fuels and topography and influenced by variability in climate, which mediated the timing, effects, and extents of fires over time. Although there are many important lessons to learn from the past, we may not be able to rely completely on past forest conditions to provide us with blueprints for current and future forest management. Rather than attempting to achieve a particular...

Native American tribes regard plants that have evolved with frequent fire and other natural resources as living cultural resources that provide, water, food, medicines, and other material goods while also sustaining tribal cultural traditions. Collaborations between management agencies and tribes and other Native American groups can incorporate traditional ecological knowledge to facilitate placed-based understanding of how fire and various management practices affect tribal cultural resources and values. Collaboration approaches reviewed in this chapter and in chapter 9.6, “Collaboration...

Wildfires, especially large, severe, and unmanageable events, exert major influences on socioecological systems, not only through risks to life and property, but also losses of important values associated with mature forest stands. These events prompt decisions about post-wildfire management interventions, including short-term emergency responses, salvage logging, and other actions to influence long-term ecological trajectories, including tree planting and treatment of fuels and shrubs. The cost-effectiveness of such interventions has been increasingly scrutinized, and scientists have...

Combining data from provenance test studies with our current understanding of predicted climate change can be a powerful tool for informing reforestation efforts. However, the limitations of both sources of data need to be understood to develop an approach to ecological restoration that reduces risk and promotes the highest chance of successful reforestation.

Building on information summaries in two previous general technical reports (PSW-GTR-220 and PSW-GTR-237), this chapter focuses on four topics raised by forest managers and stakeholders as relevant to current forest management issues. Recent studies suggest that the gap size in lower and mid-elevation historical forests with active fire regimes was often about 0.12 to 0.32 ha (0.3 to 0.8 ac). This small size was sufficient to facilitate shade-intolerant pine regeneration, probably because the surrounding forest canopy was more open than is common in modern fire-suppressed forests. Treatment...

A number of studies undertaken by the Forest Service within the synthesis area have been designed and implemented to better understand both more immediate and long-term effects of treatments, including the Blacks Mountain Ecological Research Project (Oliver 2000); Goosenest Adaptive Management Area Project (Ritchie 2005); Long-Term Soil Productivity Study (Powers 2006); National Fire and Fire Surrogate Study (McIver and Fettig 2010); the Teakettle Experiment (North 2002); the Kings River Experimental Watersheds (KREW) (Hunsaker and Eagan 2003); the Plumas-Lassen Administrative Study, which...

Changes in climate can interact with other stressors to transform ecosystems and alter the services those ecosystems provide. This synopsis presents themes that run through the synthesis report regarding the impacts of a changing climate on the forests and waters of the synthesis area as well as long-term, broad-scale, science-based strategies to promote system resilience to those impacts. Scientific observations of climate variations in air temperatures and precipitation (type and quantity) and their interactions have been directly linked to changes in stream flows (amount and timing),...

National forests in the Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade bioregions have begun to review and revise their land and resource management plans (LRMPs). The three most southern national forests of the Sierra Nevada (Inyo, Sequoia, and Sierra) were selected to be the lead forests for the Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region (Region 5) and are among the first of the Nation's 155 national forests to update their plans. The new planning rule requires the forests to consider the best available science and encourages a more active role for research in plan development. To help meet this...