Treesearch

Policymakers and decisionmakers alike have suggested that the use of less aggressive suppression strategies for wildland fires might help stem the tide of rising emergency wildland fire expenditures. However, the interplay of wildland fire management decisions and expenditures is not well understood. In this study, we assess the effect of different fire management objectives and strategies on expenditures. Analyses of 1,330 US Forest Service and US Department of Interior fires from fiscal years (FYs) 2006-2008 indicate that management objectives and strategies do affect costs, but the...

The US wildland fire community has been interested in cultivating organizational learning to improve safety and overall performance for a number of years. A key focus has been on understanding the difference between culpability (to be guilty) and accountability (to explain) and on re-orienting review processes towards building a collective account of (as opposed to finding individual blame for) unwanted outcomes. A variety of innovative methodologies have been developed, yet until this project, there has been no systematic reflection to determine whether or how any of the existing review...

In 2011, we held five 2-day workshops at various locations around the US as part of a Joint Fire Science Program project to understand 'learning from escaped prescribed fire reviews'. Each workshop drew an interagency audience with representation from all facets of fire management, from ground personnel to local line officers, regional, and national positions. Over the course of these 10 days of discussion, we developed a rich dataset and conceptual models to describe the existing and potential learning cycle in wildland fire.

For some time now, the wildland fire community has been interested in 'organizational learning' as a way to improve safety and overall performance. For instance, in the US, federal agencies have established and continue to support the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, sponsored several national conferences and are currently considering how incident reviews might be used to further organizational learning. To assist in this effort, we embarked on a Joint Fire Science Program-sponsored research project, to understand what organizational learning - even simply 'learning' - looks like...

This paper focuses on the nexus among native and nonnative fishes with respect to fire and climate change in the western United States. Although many taxa are involved, I emphasize native and nonnative salmonids because these are obligate coldwater species that might be expected to respond strongly to fire and because most research has been conducted on these fishes. Also, forested lands in federal ownership in the western United States represent the stronghold for many native coldwater taxa and are the subject of fire, fuels, and water management. I caution, however, that climate change,...

White grubs are soil-dwelling larvae of insects commonly known as “May beetles” or “June beetles” in the family Scarabaeidae. These grubs feed on herbaceous plant roots and other soil organic matter, but will also feed on the roots of woody plants, including all types of coniferous and hardwood seedlings in nursery settings. Numerous genera known to cause damage in forest nurseries include the common Phyllophaga (with more than 100 different species), Polyphylla, Diplotaxis, Dichelonyx, Serica, Cotalpa, Anomala, and others.

Smoke plume rise is critically dependent on plume updraft structure. Smoke plumes from landscape burns (forest and agricultural burns) are typically structured into “sub-plumes” or multiple-core updrafts with the number of updraft cores depending on characteristics of the landscape, fire, fuels, and weather. The number of updraft cores determines the efficiency of vertical transport of heat and particulate matter and therefore plume rise. Daysmoke, an empirical-stochastic plume rise model designed for simulating wildland fire plumes, requires updraft core number as an input. In this study,...

Among the key issues in smoke management is predicting the magnitude and location of smoke effects. These vary in severity from hazardous (acute health conditions and drastic visibility impairment to transportation) to nuisance (regional haze), and occur across a range of scales (local to continental). Over the years a variety of tools have been developed to aid in predicting smoke effects. This review follows the development of these tools, from various indices and simple screening models to complex air quality modelling systems, with a focus on how each tool represents key processes...

Fire will play an important role in shaping forest and stream ecosystems as the climate changes. Historic observations show increased dryness accompanying more widespread fire and forest die-off. These events punctuate gradual changes to ecosystems and sometimes generate stepwise changes in ecosystems. Climate vulnerability assessments need to account for fire in their calculus. The biophysical template of forest and stream ecosystems determines much of their response to fire. This report describes the framework of how fire and climate change work together to affect forest and fish...

The effects of wildfire on aquatic systems and fishes occurring in them has been linked to the direct or immediate influence of the fire on water quality and the indirect or subsequent effects on watershed characteristics and processes that influence water quality and quantity, stream channels, and aquatic biota (Gresswell 1999). Early research linking fire and aquatic systems focused on effects to soil, erosion, and water yield and quality, with a relatively limited temporal and spatial context (see Gresswell 1999 for a review). Wildfire generally was perceived as a destructive force...