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Early applications of wilderness economic research demonstrated that the values of natural amenities and commodities produced from natural areas could be measured in commensurate terms. To the surprise of many, the economic values of wilderness…
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In August of 1972, the small Bad Luck Fire signaled the start of returning fire to the wilderness for the USDA Forest Service. Forty-three years later, the wisdom of allowing perhaps the most important of the “forces of nature” to prevail has been…
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Changes in the climate and in key ecological processes are prompting increased debate about ecological restoration and other interventions in wilderness. The prospect of intervention in wilderness raises legal, scientific, and values-based questions…
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Wilderness has played an invaluable role in the development of wildland fire science. Since Agee’s review of the subject 15 years ago, tremendous progress has been made in the development of models and data, in understanding the complexity of…
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A goal of fire management in wilderness is to allow fire to play its natural ecological role without intervention. Unfortunately, most unplanned ignitions in wilderness are suppressed, in part because of the risk they might pose to values, outside…
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A s a warm up for the 2016 Learning from a Legacy of Wilderness Fire Workshop, Spotted Bear Ranger District of the Flathead National Forest and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network (NRFSN) hosted a field trip just outside the wilderness…
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RMRS Scientists have evaluated more than 40 years of satellite imagery to determine what happens when a fire burns into a previously burned area. Results from this research are helping land managers to assess whether a previous wildland fire will…
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In 1935, Elers Koch argued in a Journal of Forestry article that a minimum fire protection model should be implemented in the backcountry areas of national forests in Idaho, USA. As a USDA Forest Service Supervisor and Assistant Regional Forester,…
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As wildland fire activity continues to surge across the western US, it is increasingly important that we understand and quantify the environmental drivers of fire and how they vary across ecosystems. At daily to annual timescales, weather, fuels,…
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Wildland fire is an important disturbance agent in the western US and globally. However, the natural role of fire has been disrupted in many regions due to the influence of human activities, which have the potential to either exclude or promote fire…
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Keeping It Wild 2 is an interagency strategy to monitor trends in selected attributes of wilderness character based on lessons learned from 15 years of developing and implementing wilderness character monitoring across the National Wilderness…
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Theory suggests that natural fire regimes can result in landscapes that are both self-regulating and resilient to fire. For example, because fires consume fuel, they may create barriers to the spread of future fires, thereby regulating fire size.…
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Wilderness fire, its history, challenges, teachings, and future management were the focus of discussions and presentations during the 40 Years of Wilderness Fire in the Selway-Bitterroot field trip at the May 2014 Large Wildland Fires Conference.…
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Distinguishing favorable versus undesirable outcomes of wildland fires in coniferous forest ecosystems is challenging and requires a clear and objective approach. I applied the natural range of variation (NRV) concept and used fire severity…
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When the federal agencies established policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s to allow the use of natural fires in wilderness, they launched a natural fire management experiment in a handful of wilderness areas. As a result, wildland fire has…
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On August 18, 1972, an aerial patrol reported a snag burning deep in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho. Bob Mutch, then a young research forester, traveled to the site the following day for an on-the-ground assessment. It was, Mutch later…
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We demonstrated the utility of digital fire atlases by analyzing forest fire extent across cold, dry, and mesic forests, within and outside federally designated wilderness areas during three different fire management periods: 1900 to 1934, 1935 to…
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Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) and the Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF) cover approximately 3.7 million acres within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The majority of this land base is fairly remote, much of it either designated Wilderness or…
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Ecological systems often exhibit resilient states that are maintained through negative feedbacks. In ponderosa pine forests, fire historically represented the negative feedback mechanism that maintained ecosystem resilience; fire exclusion reduced…
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In many U.S. federally designated wilderness areas, wildfires are likely to burn of their own accord due to favorable management policies and remote location. Previous research suggested that limitations on fire size can result from the evolution of…
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