Treesearch

We developed a methodology to evaluate the efficacy of fuel treatments by estimating their costs and potential costs/losses with and without treatments in the San Jacinto Ranger District of the San Bernardino National Forest, California. This district is a typical southern California forest complex containing a large amount of high-valued real estate. We chose four sites to represent different land use types – real estate, mixture of real estate and wilderness, recreation use and non-use. Within each site, we iteratively ran the FARSITE fire simulation model using different random starting...

Recent advances in fire behavior are conforming strategies for forest management in nonindustrial private and public forests in the western United States. The strategy developed should include identifying the most cost-effective ways for allocating fire management budgets. In recreational areas, visitors’ opinion should be included in forest planning decisions and surveys have been useful tools to collect this information. However, it is difficult to assess fire prior to occurrence, particularly in areas where fire regime varies due to climate change. We merged geographic information...

Hybrid poplars have demonstrated high productivity as short rotation woody crops (SRWC) in the Midwest USA, and the hybrid aspen "Crandon" (Populus alba L. × P. grandidenta Michx.) has exhibited particularly promising yields on marginal lands. However, a key obstacle for wider deployment is the lack of economic returns early in the rotation. Alleycropping has the potential to address this issue, especially when paired with crops such as winter triticale which complete their growth cycle early in the summer and therefore are expected to exert minimal competition on establishing trees. In...

Specific gravity is an important consideration for traditional uses of hybrid poplars for pulp and solid wood products, as well as for biofuels and bioenergy production. While specific gravity has been shown to be under strong genetic control and subject to within-tree variability, the role of genotype × environment interactions is poorly understood. Most specific gravity reports are for a limited number of locations, resulting in a lack of information about the interactions between clones and sites over a wide range of climate and soil conditions. The objective of the current study was to...

Hybrid poplars have demonstrated high biomass productivity in the North Central USA as short rotation woody crops (SRWCs). However, our ability to quantitatively predict productivity for sites that are not currently in SRWCs is limited. As a result, stakeholders are also limited in their ability to evaluate different areas within the region as potential supply sheds for wood-based bioenergy facilities. A reliable method for predicting productivity across the region is needed; preferably, such a method will also lend itself to generating yield maps that stakeholders can use to inform their...

Increasing size and severity of wildfires have led to an interest in the effectiveness of forest fuels treatments on reducing fire severity and post-wildfire fuels. Our objective was to contrast stand structure and surface fuel loadings on treated and untreated sites within the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire area. Data from 140 plots on seven paired treated-untreated sites indicated that pre-wildfire treatments reduced fire severity compared with untreated sites. In 2011, coarse woody debris loading (woody material.7.62 cm in diameter) was 257% higher and fine woody debris (woody material,7.62...

After the 2009 Terrace Mountain fire near Kelowna, BC, Canada, wood shred and agricultural straw mulch effects on post-fire runoff and sediment yields were compared using three experimental techniques: rainfall simulations on 1-m2 plots, concentrated flow (rill) simulations on 9-m long plots, and sediment yields from natural rainfall on 30-m2 plots. All experimental plots were located on and along a planar hillslope burned at high severity. Experiments were conducted once a year for three consecutive years beginning in Sep 2009, except for the rainfall simulations which only were conducted...

[Spanish version: Memorias del Cuarto Simposio Internacional Sobre Políticas, Planificación, y Economía de los Incendios Forestales: Cambio Climático e Incendios Forestales.] These proceedings summarize the results of a symposium designed to address current issues of agencies with wildland fire protection responsibility at the federal and state levels in the United States as well as agencies in the international community. The topics discussed at the symposium included climate change and wildland fires: reality or illusion?, theory and models for strategic fire planning, economic analysis...

Large fires pose risks to a number of important values, including the ecology, property and the lives of incident responders. A relatively unstudied aspect of fire management is the risks to which incident managers are exposed due to organizational and sociopolitical factors that put them in a position of, for example, potential liability or degradation of their image as a leader. This paper explores the hypothesis that the concept of risk in large fire management extends beyond the potential for physical harm and includes perceived potential damages in the form of social harm that can...

The abandonment of land, the high energy load generated and accumulated by vegetation covers, climate change and interface scenarios in Mediterranean forest ecosystems are demanding serious attention to forest fire conditions. This is particularly true when dealing with the budget requirements for undertaking protection programs related to the state of current and future forest landscapes. Based on economic analysis, suppression costs represent a significant proportion of the total budget available for forest fire protection programs. The need to make efficient use of available budgets...