Search by keywords, then use filters to narrow down results by type, year, topic, or ecosystem.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 33
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…
Year Published:
Fuel treatments in ponderosa pine forests of the northern Rocky Mountains are commonly used to modify fire behavior, but it is unclear how different fuel treatments impact the subsequent production and distribution of aboveground biomass, especially…
Year Published:
Ecological restoration treatments are being implemented at an increasing rate in ponderosa pine and other dry conifer forests across the western United States, via the USDA Forest Service’s Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) program.…
Year Published:
We modeled the normal fire environment for occurrence of large forest wildfires (>40 ha) for the Pacific Northwest Region of the United States. Large forest wildfire occurrence data from the recent climate normal period (1971-2000) was used…
Year Published:
Hand-constructed piles in eastern Washington and north-central New Mexico were weighed periodically between October 2011 and June 2015 to develop decay-rate constants that are useful for estimating the rate of piled biomass loss over time. Decay-…
Year Published:
Since 2009, the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service has promoted an “all lands approach” to forest restoration, particularly relevant in the context of managing wildfire. To characterize its implementation, we undertook an inventory of what…
Year Published:
Fire may remove or create dead wood aboveground, but it is less clear how high severity burning of soils affects belowground microbial communities and soil processes, and for how long. In this study, we investigated soil fungal and bacterial…
Year Published:
Interest in PNW forests is shifting from a focus on old-growth forests alone to include the ecological value and processes of early-seral communities. However, focusing on the alpha and omega states of a linear successional model does not account…
Year Published:
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…
Year Published:
The effect of topography on wildfire distribution in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of debate. We suspect the size of the study area, and the assumption fire return intervals are distributed as a Weibull distribution used in many previous…
Year Published:
Recent studies have highlighted the potential of linking fire behaviour to plant ecophysiology as an improved route to characterising severity, but research to date has been limited to laboratory-scale investigations. Fine-scale fire behaviour…
Year Published:
Climate change is projected to exacerbate the intensity of heat waves and drought, leading to a greater incidence of large and high-intensity wildfires in forested ecosystems. Predicting responses of seedlings to such fires requires a process-based…
Year Published:
Mulching fuels treatments have been increasingly implemented by forest managers in the western USA to reduce crown fire hazard. These treatments use heavy machinery to masticate or chip unwanted shrubs and small-diameter trees and broadcast the…
Year Published:
Induced defense is a common plant strategy in response to herbivory. Although abiotic damage, such as physical wounding, pruning, and heating, can induce plant defense, the effect of such damage by large-scale abiotic disturbances on induced…
Year Published:
The recent mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak across western North America's interior lodgepole pine forests has altered the landscape such that the majority of wildfires in the region will now burn through MPB-affected stands. Study of plant…
Year Published:
Context: An increase in the incidence of large wildfires worldwide has prompted concerns about the resilience of forest ecosystems, particularly in the western U.S., where recent changes are linked with climate warming and 20th-century land…
Year Published:
The risk of bark beetle outbreaks is widely predicted to increase because of a warming climate that accelerates temperature-driven beetle population growth and drought stress that impairs host tree defenses. However, few if any studies have…
Year Published:
Recent and projected increases in the frequency and severity of large wildfires in the western U.S. makes understanding the factors that strongly affect landscape fire patterns a management priority for optimizing treatment location. We compared the…
Year Published:
The use of fire as a land management tool is well recognized for its ecological benefits in many natural systems. To continue to use fire while complying with air quality regulations, land managers are often tasked with modeling emissions from…
Year Published:
The implementation of US federal forest restoration programs on national forests is a complex process that requires balancing diverse socioecological goals with project economics. Despite both the large geographic scope and substantial investments…
Year Published: