Treesearch

Biomass burning emissions estimates of gas and aerosol air pollutants are used in modeling and forecasting smoke and air quality. These emissions originate from combustion of the fuels found in the landscape and vary based on the terrain, weather, fuel type, and condition of the fuelbed, including the arrangement of fuels, during the fire event. Combustion describes the flaming and smoldering burning phases of a fire that, summed over the duration of the event, equals the fuel consumed. This chapter provides a review of approaches to quantify fuel consumption from biomass burning relevant...

Wildland fuels are foundational to smoke prediction and generally contribute to high uncertainty in smoke production and dispersion modellng. Until recently, wildland fuels and fuel consumption have been mapped using traditional methods to estimate the cover, height, and biomass (kg m-2). Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in describing and quantifying fuels more accurately with 3D characterization and quantification across-large spatial scales. This chapter introduces wildland fuels and approaches to mapping them at scales relevant to smoke management, smoke impacts...

Water supply is a critical component of tree physiological health, influencing a tree’s photosynthetic activity and resilience to disturbances. The climatic regions of the western United States are particularly at risk from increasing drought, fire, and pest interactions. Existing methods for quantifying drought stress and a tree’s relative resilience against disturbances mostly use moderate-scale (20-30 m) multispectral satellite sensor data. However, tree water status (i.e., water stress) quantification using sensors like Landsat and Sentinel are error-prone given that the spectral...

Elk (Cervus canadensis) are the second largest member of the deer family that reside in North America. Historically, the species occupied most of North America, however, today, they occupy only a small proportion of that range. Across their historical and contemporary distribution, they occupied diverse vegetation communities including both rangelands and forest ecosystems. Given this broad distribution, elk face numerous conservation and management threats including competition with wild and domestic ungulates, disease considerations, and human-elk conflicts. This chapter highlights these...

Wildfire occurrences have increased and are projected to continue increasing globally. Strategic, evidence-based planning with diverse stakeholders, making use of diverse ecological and social data, is crucial for confronting and mitigating the associated risks. Prescribed fire, when planned and executed carefully, is a key management tool in this effort. Assessing where prescribed fire can be a particularly effective forest management tool can help prioritize efforts, reduce wildfire risk, and support fire-resilient lands and communities. We collaborated with expert stakeholders to...

Risks associated with severe wildfire are growing in forest landscapes due to interactions among climate change, fuel accumulation from fire suppression, an expanding wildland–urban interface, and additional factors. People, infrastructure, ecosystem services, and forest health all face varying degrees of risk. The spatial distributions of the many social and ecological factors that influence wildfire, its impacts, and management responses are an important landscape-level context for managing risks and fostering resilient lands and communities. Decision-support tools that integrate these...

Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires. A key question facing managers is how to scale treatments into manageable project areas that meet operational and administrative constraints, and then prioritize their implementation over time to maximize fire management outcomes. We developed and tested a spatial modeling system to optimize the implementation of a proposed 3,538 km fuel break network...

Invasive plants, which cause substantial economic and ecological impacts, acquire both pathogens and beneficial microbes in their introduced ranges. Communities of fungal endophytes are known to mediate impacts of pathogens on plant fitness but few studies have examined the temporal dynamics of fungal communities on invasive plants. The annual grass Microstegium vimineum, an invader of forests and riparian areas throughout the eastern United States, experiences annual epidemics of disease caused by Bipolaris pathogens. Our objective was to characterize the dynamics of foliar fungal...

Invasive plants can significantly impact the diversity of understory ground flora and forest regeneration in eastern North America. However, managing invasive plants has resulted in positive, negative, or neutral effects on key ecosystem components depending on treatment type, duration, and intensity. Management may also result in short-term control, but legacy effects from prior land use or secondary invasions may hamper desired long-term outcomes. We conducted a systematic review of the invasive plant management literature for eastern North American forests to examine treatment outcomes...

Wildfire futures and aboveground carbon (C) dynamics associated with forest restoration programs that integrate resource objective wildfire as part of a larger treatment strategy are not well understood. Using simulation modeling, we examined alternative forest and fuel management strategies on a 237,218-ha study area within a 778,000-ha landscape that is a high priority target for federal restoration programs. We simulated two wildfire management scenarios combined with three levels of conventional forest restoration treatments over 64 years using a detailed landscape disturbance and...