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Displaying 21 - 40 of 342

A long-term study at Lick Creek demonstrates how fuel treatments in dry forests provide benefits beyond mitigating the chance of a high-severity fire.
Author(s): Nehalem C. Clark
Year Published:

Charcoal identification and the quantification of its abundance in sedimentary archives is commonly used to reconstruct fire frequency and the amounts of biomass burning. There are, however, limited metrics to measure past fire temperature and fuel…
Author(s): S. Yoshi Maezumi, William D. Gosling, Judith Kirschner, Manuel Chevalier, Henk L. Cornelissen, Thilo Heinecke, Crystal H. McMichael
Year Published:

Projected warming of global surface air temperatures will further exacerbate droughts, wildfires, and other agents of ecosystem stress. We use latewood blue intensity from high‐elevation Picea engelmannii to reconstruct late‐summer maximum air…
Author(s): Karen J. Heeter, Maegen L. Rochner, Grant Harley
Year Published:

Fire ecology has a long history of empirical investigation in rangelands. However, the science is inconclusive and incomplete, sparking increasing interest on how to advance the discipline. Here, we introduce a new framework for qualitatively and…
Author(s): Dirac Twidwell, Christine H. Bielski, Rheinhardt Scholtz, Samuel D. Fuhlendorf
Year Published:

Aims:Fire regimes are key drivers of ecosystem dynamics and are changing worldwide. Uncertainty about how fire history affects responses to individual fires hampers predictions of fire impacts on important ecosystem functions such as C cycling. Thus…
Author(s): Ingrid J. Slette, Alannah Liebert, Alan K. Knapp
Year Published:

Harold Biswell first learned about the benefits of prescribed fire in forest management when he was a Forest Service researcher in Georgia, USA. After he accepted a professorship in the School of Forestry at the University of California, Berkeley,…
Author(s): Scott L. Stephens, Jan W. van Wagtendonk, James K. Agee, Ronald H. Wakimoto
Year Published:

Wildfires in many western North American forests are becoming more frequent, larger, and severe, with changed seasonal patterns. In response, coniferous forest ecosystems will transition toward dominance by fire-adapted hardwoods, shrubs, meadows,…
Author(s): Henriette I. Jager, Jonathan Long, Rachel L. Malison, Brendan P. Murphy, Ashley J. Rust, Luiz G. M. Silva, Rahel Sollmann, Zachary L. Steel, Mark D. Bowen, Jason B. Dunham, Joseph L. Ebersole, Rebecca L. Flitcroft
Year Published:

Recent wildfires in the western United States have led to substantial economic losses and social stresses. There is a great concern that the new climatic state may further increase the intensity, duration, and frequency of wildfires. To examine…
Author(s): Emily K. Brown, Jiali Wang, Yan Feng
Year Published:

Climate change is expected to increase fire activity in many regions of the globe, but the relative role of human vs. lightning-caused ignitions on future fire regimes is unclear. We developed statistical models that account for the spatiotemporal…
Author(s): Ana M. G. Barros, Michelle A. Day, Haiganoush K. Preisler, John T. Abatzoglou, Meg A. Krawchuk, Rachel M. Houtman, Alan A. Ager
Year Published:

An automated burned area extraction routine that attempts to overcome the particular difficulties of remote sensing applications in complex landscapes is presented and tested in the mountainous region of northwest Yunnan, China. In particular, the…
Author(s): David Fornacca, Guopeng Ren, Wen Xiao
Year Published:

Wildland fire shaped the historical ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forest landscapes throughout the West. Fire was also a controlling force in most of the drier vegetation types, ranging from shortgrass prairie to chaparral, scrub oak, and pinyon–…
Author(s): Stephen F. Arno
Year Published:

Background: Prairie-forest ecotones are ecologically important for biodiversity and ecological processes. While these ecotones cover small areas, their sharp gradients in land cover promote rich ecological interaction and high conservation value.…
Author(s): Penelope Morgan, Emily K. Heyerdahl, Eva K. Strand, Stephen C. Bunting, James P. Riser, John T. Abatzoglou, Max W. Nielsen-Pincus, Mara Johnson
Year Published:

Increases in burned area across the western US since the mid‐1980’s have been widely documented and linked partially to climate factors, yet evaluations of trends in fire severity are lacking. Here, we evaluate fire severity trends and their…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Climate-driven increases in disturbance frequency and extent augment the potential for compounded disturbances. Drawing on well-studied forests that experienced successive disturbances, we asked: (1) how does post-fire cover of litter, herbaceous…
Author(s): Nathan S. Gill, Daniel Jarvis, John Rogan, Dominik Kulakowski
Year Published:

The statistical analysis of wildland fire activity is integral to wildland fire planning, operations, and research across the globe. Historical fire records are inputs to fire danger rating applications, fire-potential forecast models, geospatial…
Author(s): Karen C. Short, Marty Ahrens, Sarah Harris, Jesus San-Miguel-Ayanz
Year Published:

Wildfire is a ubiquitous disturbance agent in subalpine forests in western North America. Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia), a dominant tree species in these forests, is largely resilient to high-severity fires, but this resilience may…
Author(s): Barrie V. Chileen, Kendra K. McLauchlan, Philip E. Higuera, Meredith Parish, Bryan N. Shuman
Year Published:

Warm summer temperatures and longer fire seasons are promoting larger, and in some cases, more fires that are severe in low- and mid-elevation, dry mixed-conifer forests of the Northern Rocky Mountains (NRM). Long-term historical fire conditions and…
Author(s): Dave McWethy, Mio Alt, Elena Argiriadis, Dario Battistel, Richard G. Everett, Gregory T. Pederson
Year Published:

Fire refugia—locations that burn less severely or less frequently than surrounding areas—support late-successional and old-growth forest structure and function. This study investigates the influence of topography and fuels on the probability of…
Author(s): Garrett W. Meigs, Christopher J. Dunn, Sean A. Parks, Meg A. Krawchuk
Year Published:

Boreal forest and tundra biomes are key components of the Earth system because the mobilization of large carbon stocks and changes in energy balance could act as positive feedbacks to ongoing climate change. In Alaska, wildfire is a primary driver…
Author(s): Tyler J. Hoecker, Philip E. Higuera, Ryan Kelly, Feng Sheng Hu
Year Published:

Background: Ecological disturbance is a major driver of ecosystem structure and evolutionary selection, and theory predicts that the frequency and/or intensity of disturbance should determine its effects on communities. However, adaptations of…
Author(s): Jesse E. D. Miller, Hugh Safford
Year Published: