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Early-seral forests are expanding throughout western North America as fire frequency and annual area burned increase, yet fire behaviour in young postfire forests is poorly understood. We simulated fire behaviour in 24-year-old lodgepole pine (Pinus…
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Restoration treatments in dry forests of the western US often attempt silvicultural practices to restore the historical characteristics of forest structure and fire behavior. However, it is suggested that a reliance on non-spatial metrics of forest…
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As large, high-severity forest fires increase and snowpacks become more vulnerable to climate change across the western USA, it is important to understand post-fire disturbance impacts on snow hydrology. Here, we examine, quantify, parameterize,…
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Prescribed fire is a primary tool used to restore western forests following more than a century of fire exclusion, reducing fire hazard by removing dead and live fuels (small trees and shrubs). It is commonly assumed that the reduced forest density…
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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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Mastication is an increasingly common fuels treatment that redistributes 'ladder' fuels to the forest floor to reduce vertical fuel continuity, crown fire potential, and fireline intensity, but fuel models do not exist for predicting fire…
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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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Live fuel moisture content (LFMC), the ratio of water mass to dry mass contained in live plant material, is an important fuel property for determining fire danger and for modeling fire behavior. Remote sensing estimation of LFMC often relies on an…
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Live foliar moisture content (LFMC) significantly influences wildland fire behaviour. However, characterising variations in LFMC is difficult because both foliar mass and dry mass can change throughout the season. Here we quantify the seasonal…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Two evaluations were undertaken of the regression equations developed by M. Cruz, M. Alexander and R. Wakimoto (2003, International Journal of Wildland Fire 12, 39-50) for estimating canopy fuel stratum characteristics from stand structure variables…
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The interaction of fires, where one fire burns into another recently burned area, is receiving increased attention from scientists and land managers wishing to describe the role of fire scars in affecting landscape pattern and future fire spread.…
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The unique nature of landscapes has challenged our ability to make generalizations about the effects of bottom-up controls on fire regimes. For four geographically distinct fire-prone landscapes in western North America, we used a consistent…
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Quantifying the effects of mountain pine beetle (MPB)-caused tree mortality on potential crown fire hazard has been challenging partly because of limitations in current operational fire behavior models. Such models are not capable of accounting for…
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Declining forest health attributed to associations between extensive bark beetle-caused tree mortality, accumulations of hazardous fuels, wildfire, and climate change have catalyzed changes in forest health and wildfire protection policies of land…
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Very little is known about how foliar moisture and chemistry change after a mountain pine beetle attack and even less is known about how these intrinsic foliar characteristics alter foliage ignitability. Here, we examine the fuel characteristics and…
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We used the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FFE-FVS) to simulate fuel treatment effects on 45,162 stands in low- to midelevation dry forests (e.g., ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex. P. & C. Laws.) and…
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Removal of dead and live biomass from forested stands affects subsequent fuel dynamics and fire potential. The amount of material left onsite after biomass removal operations can influence the intensity and severity of subsequent unplanned wildfires…
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