Search by keywords, then use filters to narrow down results by type, year, topic, or ecosystem.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 23
Stand-level spatial pattern influences key aspects of resilience and ecosystem function such as disturbance behavior, regeneration, snow retention, and habitat quality in frequent-fire pine and mixed-conifer forests. Reference sites, from both pre-…
Year Published:
Terrie Jain, Russell Graham, Andrew Hudak, and Bill Elliot with the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) Rocky Mountain Research Station, led a tour of fuels treatments in mostly moist mixed-conifer forests in the Priest River Experimental Forest (…
Year Published:
In the US, wildfires and prescribed burning present significant challenges to air regulatory agencies attempting to achieve and maintain compliance with air quality regulations. Fire emission factors (EF) are essential input for the emission models…
Year Published:
Land managers of the northern Rocky Mountains and south-central U.S. are challenged with numerous social and ecological changes, many of which are linked to climate change. The work presented here focuses on two important research gaps: 1) managers…
Year Published:
A goal of fire management in wilderness is to allow fire to play its natural ecological role without intervention. Unfortunately, most unplanned ignitions in wilderness are suppressed, in part because of the risk they might pose to values outside of…
Year Published:
Changes in key drivers (e.g., climate, disturbance regimes and land use) may affect the sustainability of forest landscapes and set the stage for increased tension among competing ecosystem services. We addressed two questions about a suite of…
Year Published:
In many U.S. federally designated wilderness areas, wildfires are likely to burn of their own accord due to favorable management policies and remote location. Previous research suggested that limitations on fire size can result from the evolution of…
Year Published:
Wildland fires often cause extreme changes in the landscape that drastically influence surface runoff and soil erosion, which can impact forest resources, aquatic habitats, water supplies, public safety, and forest access infrastructure such as…
Year Published:
Recent bark beetle outbreaks have had a significant impact on forests throughout western North America and have generated concerns about interactions and feedbacks between beetle attacks and fire. However, research has been hindered by a lack of…
Year Published:
Biomass burning is a significant contributor to atmospheric carbon emissions, but may also provide an avenue in which fire-affected ecosystems can accumulate carbon over time, through the generation of highly resistant fire-altered carbon.…
Year Published:
We present a technique for modelling conditional burn probability patterns in two dimensions for large wildland fires. The intended use for the model is strategic program planning when information about future fire weather and event durations is…
Year Published:
Mulch treatments often are used to mitigate post-fire increases in runoff and erosion rates but the comparative effectiveness of various mulches is not well established. The ability of mulch treatments to reduce sediment yields from natural rainfall…
Year Published:
Climate projections for the next 20-50 years forecast higher temperatures and variable precipitation for many landscapes in the western United States. Climate changes may cause or contribute to threshold shifts, or tipping points, where relatively…
Year Published:
Recent work in model systems has demonstrated significant effects of rapid evolutionary change on ecological processes (eco-evolutionary dynamics). Fewer studies have addressed whether eco-evolutionary dynamics structure natural ecosystems. We…
Year Published:
The transformation of fuels resulting from the mountain pine beetle epidemic is unprecedented in its large geographic extent and the rapid pace of the transformation. This paper describes a proposed fire risk and hazard characterization system, as…
Year Published:
Projected increases in wildfire and other climate-driven disturbances will affect populations and communities worldwide, including host-parasite relationships. Research in temperate forests has shown that wildfire can negatively affect amphibians,…
Year Published:
The Western Mountain Initiative (WMI), a consortium of research groups in the Western United States, focuses on understanding and predicting responses-especially sensitivities, thresholds, resistance, and resilience-of mountain ecosystems to…
Year Published:
Wildfire is one of the two most significant disturbance agents (the other being insects) in forest ecosystems of the Western United States, and in a warmer climate, will drive changes in forest composition, structure, and function (Dale et al. 2001…
Year Published:
The state of knowledge about climatic effects on forests of the Northwest region was recently summarized in a peer reviewed assessment of these effects in Washington (Littell et al. 2009, 2010) and a white paper on climatic effects on Oregon…
Year Published:
Thinning is a common silvicultural treatment being widely used to restore different types of overstocked forest stands in western U.S. because of its effect on changing fire behavior. Typically, thinning is applied at the stand level using…
Year Published: