Treesearch

Missoula District Ranger Jennifer Hensiek and other field trip presenters (see list of presenters at end) led about 35 participants on a tour through a portion of the Marshall Woods Restoration Project in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area on the Lolo National Forest (NF). The tour included stops throughout the project area to view thinning and prescribed burn treatments, as well as stops on private land adjacent to the project area to demonstrate the importance of community and partner engagement to project success. The number of unique stakeholders invested in the project area...

Wildfire environmental impacts and the threat they pose to human live and values depend of how fast it spreads, how much biomass is consumed, and how much energy it releases and at what rate. Nearly every feature of contemporary fire management relies upon the understanding and prediction of fire behavior characteristics and a number of tools have been developed for such purpose. However, no attempts have been made so far to provide an overall worldwide picture of fire behavior characteristics, patterns and drivers. These are the general objectives of the BONFIRE project, requiring...

Army Garrison Camp Williams (AGCW) is a military based located south of Herriman, UT. The base serves primarily as a training area for the Utah National Guard and is a fire-prone landscape located adjacent to urban development. The fire regime at Army Garrison Camp Williams (AGCW) was described in terms of fire frequency, annual area burned, sources of wildfire ignition, and historical fire patterns based on an analysis of historical fire perimeters (table 1). Additionally, Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) data (Rollins and Frame 2006) were utilized to...

A case study is presented for the major run of the Machine Gun Fire on September 19, 2010, which started within the confines of Army Garrison Camp Williams (AGCW) and spread beyond installation boundaries to the north, destroying three homes and requiring an evacuation of approximately 1600 people in an adjacent community. This fire was selected for a wildfire behavior case study analysis because of its large size and destructive nature in relation to the wildland urban-interface area adjoining the base. Alexander and Thomas (2003) suggest that a wildland fire behavior case study should...

In August 2016, a fire caused by negligence during leisure activities started in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of Rognac (NE of Marseille, southeast France). The fire was driven by a strong wind and exceptionally dry and warm climatic conditions, burning almost 3,000 ha, mostly in an urbanized area, in a few hours. These severe meteorological conditions led to difficult firefighting operations, already hampered by a lack of resources due to several aircraft being grounded for maintenance and by six other fires burning at the same time in the area. The fire impacted seven communities,...

The area occupied by mountain big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata subsp. vaseyana) communities has been greatly reduced since European-American settlement and is likely to be further reduced due to ongoing threats including land use and development, woodland expansion, nonnative plant invasions, altered fire regimes, and climate change. These threats and the recent federal listing review of greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) make conservation and proper management of sagebrush communities key priorities.

Federal wildland fire agencies are increasingly reaching across jurisdictional boundaries to their state, county, and local partners to better manage the unwanted effects of wildland fire, guided, in part, by the National Cohesive Wildfire Strategy. This collaborative and inclusive fire management strategy includes efforts to promote fire adapted communities through improved land use planning via a program called Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW, http://planningforwildfire.org/). CPAW provides communities with professional assistance from land use planners, foresters,...

Ecological resilience is a concept that is now being used to guide U.S. land management into the uncertain future. However, there are few operational means of assessing the resilience of a landscape or ecosystem. We present a new method for quantifying resilience that uses simulated historical range and variation (HRV) time series as the benchmark or reference to compare to contemporary conditions to assess resilience. However, managing for resilience based on historical conditions is somewhat tenuous in this era of climate change, therefore we integrate projected future conditions with...

A fire regime describes the role fire plays in an ecosystem for a given location and over a specific time period (Agee 1993). The concept is multivariate in nature (Krebs et al. 2010) and therefore is best described by a combination of parameters including fire frequency, severity, extent, seasonality, and relationship with climate. How these parameters vary across space and time and with environmental factors (e.g., elevation and latitude) reveals the underlying dynamics that constitute the fire regime for a given ecosystem. Fire regimes of forest communities are commonly described as...

Wildfire risk mitigation research has focused on either its biophysical or social components, with few studies attempting to integrate both. Studies that have coupled social and biophysical systems have not considered the source of fire risk (Cutter et al. 2003; Davies et al. 2018; Oliveira et al. 2017; Parisien et al. 2016; Rappold et al. 2017; Wigtil et al. 2016), or were applied at limited geographic scale (Fischer et al. 2014; Olsen et al. 2017) leaving a gap in our knowledge about how and where biophysical fire risk is transmitted and affects populations. Vulnerable populations, in...