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In the western United States, mountain pine beetles (MPBs) have killed pine trees across 71,000 km2 of forest since the mid-1990s, leading to widespread concern that abundant dead fuels may increase area burned and exacerbate fire behavior. Although…
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Forest fires fundamentally shape the habitats available for wildlife. Current predictions for fire under a warming climate suggest larger and more severe fires may occur, thus challenging scientists and managers to understand and predict impacts of…
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Climate science and understanding how climate change may affect the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) have come a long way since our 1992 Yellowstone Science article (Romme and Turner 1992, based on Romme and Turner 1991). In…
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Periodic fire is thought to improve whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) regeneration by reducing competition and creating openings, but the mechanisms by which fire affects seedling establishment are poorly understood. I compared seedling…
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Patches of live, dead, and dying trees resulting from bark beetle-caused mortality alter spatial and temporal variability in the canopy and surface fuel complex through changes in the foliar moisture content of attacked trees and through the…
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Freshwater ecosystems are warming globally from the direct effects of climate change on air temperature and hydrology and the indirect effects on near-stream vegetation. In fire-prone landscapes, vegetative change may be especially rapid and cause…
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Both satellite imagery and spatial fire effects models are valuable tools for generating burn severity maps that are useful to fire scientists and resource managers. The purpose of this study was to test a new mapping approach that integrates…
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The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) was established over 20 years ago as an experiment in large landscape conservation. Initially, Y2Y emerged as a response to large scale habitat fragmentation by advancing ecological connectivity…
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Bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires are principal drivers of change in western North American forests, and both have increased in severity and extent in recent years. These two agents of disturbance interact in complex ways to shape forest structure…
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Wildland fire is an important natural process in many ecosystems. However, fire exclusion has reduced frequency of fire and area burned in many dry forest types, which may affect vegetation structure and composition, and potential fire behavior. In…
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Changes in the properties of an ash layer with time may affect the amount of post-fire runoff, particularly by the formation of ash surface crusts. The formation of depositional crusts by ash have been observed at the pore and plot scales, but the…
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Prior to fire suppression and exclusion, wildfires and other disturbances (e.g., insects, disease, and weather) sustained ecosystem processes in many landscapes of the Western United States. However, wildfires have been increasing in size, frequency…
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The ecological effects of forest fires burning with high severity are long-lived and have the greatest impact on vegetation successional trajectories, as compared to low-to-moderate severity fires. The primary drivers of high severity fire are…
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Mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks within the previous 10-15 years have affected millions of hectares of lodgepole pine forests in western North America. Concerns about the influence of recent tree mortality on changes in fire behaviour amongst…
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Recent work has demonstrated that evolutionary processes shape ecological dynamics on relatively short timescales (eco-evolutionary dynamics), but demonstrating these effects at large spatial scales in natural landscapes has proven difficult. We…
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The final webinar in the Future Forest Webinar Series provided an example of how managers utilized available science to address questions about post-epidemic forest conditions. Assessments of current conditions and projected trends, and how these…
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Widespread tree mortality caused by outbreaks of native bark beetles (Circulionidae: Scolytinae) in recent decades has raised concern among scientists and forest managers about whether beetle outbreaks fuel more ecologically severe forest fires and…
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More frequent fire activity associated with climate warming is expected to increase the extent of young forest stands in fire-prone landscapes, yet growth rates and biomass allocation patterns in young forests that regenerated naturally following…
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While the use of timber harvests is generally accepted as an effective approach to controlling bark beetles during outbreaks, in reality there has been a dearth of monitoring to assess outcomes, and failures are often not reported. Additionally, few…
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The Future Forest Webinar Series facilitated dialogue between scientists and managers about the challenges and opportunities created by the mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic. The series consisted of six webinar facilitated by the USFS Rocky…
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