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Most landscape-scale fire severity research relies on correlations between field measures of fire effects and relatively simple spectral reflectance indices that are not direct measures of heat output or changes in plant physiology. Although many…
Author(s): Alistair M. S. Smith, Aaron M. Sparks, Crystal A. Kolden, John T. Abatzoglou, Alan F. Talhelm, Daniel M. Johnson, Luigi Boschetti, James A. Lutz, Kent G. Apostol, Kara M. Yedinak, Wade T. Tinkham, Robert L. Kremens
Year Published:

The environmental effect of extreme soil heating, such as occurs with the complete combustion of large downed wood during wildfires, is a post-fire management concern to forest managers. To address this knowledge gap, we stacked logs to create ‘mega…
Author(s): Jane E. Smith, Ariel D. Cowan, Stephen A. Fitzgerald
Year Published:

Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity. Using a severity metric calculated by modelling the cumulative distribution of differenced Normalized…
Author(s): Joshua J. Picotte, Birgit Peterson, Gretchen Meier, Stephen M. Howard
Year Published:

Increasing rates of natural disturbances under a warming climate raise important questions about how multiple disturbances interact. Escalating wildfire activity in recent decades has resulted in some forests re-burning in short succession, but how…
Author(s): Brian J. Harvey, Daniel C. Donato, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

Resilience in fire-prone forests is strongly affected by landscape burn-severity patterns, in part by governing propagule availability around stand-replacing patches in which all or most vegetation is killed. However, little is known about drivers…
Author(s): Brian J. Harvey, Daniel C. Donato, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

Fire severity maps are an important tool for understanding fire effects on a landscape. The relative differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) is a commonly used severity index in California forests, and is typically divided into four categories:…
Author(s): Jamie M. Lydersen, Brandon M. Collins, Jay D. Miller, Danny L. Fry, Scott L. Stephens
Year Published:

Determining how the frequency, severity, and extent of forest fires are changing in response to changes in management and climate is a key concern in many regions where fire is an important natural disturbance. In the USA the only national-scale…
Author(s): Thomas R. Whittier, Andrew N. Gray
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Hundreds of articles are published about wildland fires in Northern Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine communities. The author of this FEIS synthesis reviewed over 300 publications on historical and contemporary fuel loads, stand structure, and fire…
Author(s): Janet L. Fryer
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No abstract available.
Author(s): Justin Barton Lauer
Year Published:

We use the historical presence of high-severity fire patches in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States to make several points that we hope will encourage development of a more ecologically informed view of severe wildland fire effects.…
Author(s): Richard L. Hutto, Robert E. Keane, Rosemary L. Sherriff, Christopher T. Rota, Lisa A. Eby, Victoria A. Saab
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There is a widespread view among land managers and others that the protected status of many forestlands in the western United States corresponds with higher fire severity levels due to historical restrictions on logging that contribute to greater…
Author(s): Curtis M. Bradley, Chad T. Hanson, Dominick A. DellaSala
Year Published:

Wildfire is a key factor influencing bird community composition in western North American forests. We need to understand species and community responses to wildfire and how responses vary regionally to effectively manage dry conifer forests for…
Author(s): Quresh Latif, Jamie Sanderlin, Victoria A. Saab, William M. Block, Jonathan G. Dudley
Year Published:

The direct effects of climate change on alpine treeline ecotones – the transition zones between subalpine forest and non-forested alpine vegetation – have been studied extensively, but climate-induced changes in disturbance regimes have received…
Author(s): C. Alina Cansler, Donald McKenzie, Charles B. Hansler
Year Published:

Using Landsat imagery, this study was conducted to evaluate a fire disturbance that occurred in Canada’s Grasslands National Park on 27 April 2013. We used spectral indices (e.g. Normalised Burn Ratio (NBR) and Mid-infrared Burn Index (MIRBI))…
Author(s): Bing Lu, Yuhong He, Alexander Tong
Year Published:

Fuel accumulation and climate shifts are predicted to increase the frequency of high-severity fires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests of central Oregon. The combustion of fuels containing large downed wood can result in intense soil…
Author(s): Ariel D. Cowan, Jane E. Smith, Stephen A. Fitzgerald
Year Published:

Soil organic matter plays a key role in the global carbon cycle, representing three to four times the total carbon stored in plant or atmospheric pools. Although fires convert a portion of the faster cycling organic matter to slower cycling black…
Author(s): Wade T. Tinkham, Alistair M. S. Smith, Philip E. Higuera, Jeff A. Hatten, Nolan W. Brewer, Stefan H. Doerr
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Recent large scale mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, MPB) outbreaks have created concern regarding increased fuel loadings and exacerbated fire behavior and have prompted a desire to understand the effects of sequential…
Author(s): Michelle Agne, Travis J. Woolley, Stephen A. Fitzgerald
Year Published:

Like many fire-adapted ecosystems, decades of fire exclusion policy in the Rocky Mountains and Foothills natural regions of southern Alberta, Canada are raising concern over the loss of ecological integrity. Departure from historical conditions is…
Author(s): Michael D. Flannigan, Brad C. Hawkes, Marc-Andre Parisien, Marie-Pierre Rogeau, Rick Arthur
Year Published:

Quantifying historical fire regimes provides important information for managing contemporary forests. Historical fire frequency and severity can be estimated using several methods; each method has strengths and weaknesses and presents challenges for…
Author(s): Jens T. Stevens, Hugh Safford, Malcolm P. North, Jeremy S. Fried, Andrew N. Gray, Peter M. Brown, Christopher R. Dolanc, Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Donald A. Falk, Calvin A. Farris, Jerry F. Franklin, Peter Z. Fule, R. Keala Hagmann, Eric E. Knapp, Alan H. Taylor, Jay D. Miller, Douglas F. Smith, Thomas W. Swetnam
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Woody plant expansion is a global phenomenon that alters the spatial distribution of nutrients, biomass, and fuels in affected ecosystems. Altered fuel patterns across the landscape influences ecological processes including fire behavior, fire…
Author(s): Nathan I. Weiner, Eva K. Strand, Stephen C. Bunting, Alistair M. S. Smith
Year Published: