Treesearch

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...

Wildland fires burn millions of forested hectares annually around the world, affecting biodiversity, carbon storage, hydrologic processes, and ecosystem services largely through fire-induced tree mortality (Bond-Lamberty et al. 2007; Dantas et al. 2016). In spite of this widespread importance, the underlying mechanisms of fire-caused tree mortality remain poorly understood, (Hood et al. 2018). Post-fire tree mortality has been traditionally modeled as an empirical function of tree defenses (bark thickness) and fire injury (crown scorch, stem char) (Ryan and Amman 1996; Woolley et al....

This work deals with a fire spreading upslope under either no-wind conditions or weak wind velocities. The surface fire propagation model developed at the University of Corsica is used; this model takes into account convective and radiative effects. The model is based on the coupling of the properties of the spreading fire with other conditions (wind, topography) and consists of a feedback effect caused by the flow induced by the fire in the presence of a positive slope. The expression of this induced wind, coupled to the propagation model gives an algebraic relationship for the rate of...

This work deals with the construction of a fire behavior model that can be easily used by people involved in firefighting or in environmental planning. The model has to provide the main physical characteristics of the fire front (rate of spread, flame tilt angle, flame height, flame length, flame temperature etc.). As this model has to be a universal one, it can be applied to any surface fire configuration without any change in the model. Keywords: physical model, radiation, convection, rate of spread.

Climate change is expected to have heterogeneous effects on agriculture across the USA, where temperature and precipitation regimes are already changing. While the overall effect of climate change on agriculture is uncertain, farmers’ perceptions of current and future climate and weather conditions will be a key factor in how they adapt. This paper analyzes data from paired surveys (N = 817) and natural variation from baseline weather across the inland Pacific Northwest (iPNW), to determine if long-term, gradual changes in precipitation, and temperature distributions affect farmers’...

Farmers, particularly small farmers, are on the frontlines of climate change. In Oregon’s Southern Willamette Valley, a needs assessment was conducted of small farmers in 2017, where questions related to climate change risks, attitudes toward adaptation and climate beliefs were assessed. Out of all the respondents (n = 123), the majority (70%) believe that climate change is occurring, and is caused mostly by human activities. The majority (58%) also strongly agree with the statement that they will have to change practices to cope with increasing climate variability in order to ensure the...