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Displaying 161 - 180 of 2233

The western U.S. is experiencing increasing wildfire activity and warmer, drier climate conditions, with declining post-fire tree regeneration observed in many areas in recent years. Seedlings of mixed-conifer and subalpine forest species are…
Author(s): Kyra D. Wolf, Kimberley T. Davis, Philip E. Higuera
Year Published:

Fire suppression and the loss of western white pine (WWP) have made northern Rocky Mountain moist mixed-conifer forests less disturbance resilient. Although managers are installing hundreds of plantations, most of these plantations have not…
Author(s): Theresa B. Jain, Andrew S. Nelson, Benjamin C. Bright, John C. Byrne, Andrew T. Hudak
Year Published:

After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and…
Author(s): Paul F. Hessburg, Susan Charnley, Andrew N. Gray, Thomas A. Spies, David W. Peterson, Rebecca L. Flitcroft, Kendra L. Wendel, Jessica E. Halofsky, Eric M. White, John D. Marshall
Year Published:

Surface fuel loads are a key driver of forest fires and the target of hazard reduction burns to reduce fire risk. However, the role of biota in decomposition, or feedbacks between fire and decomposer communities are rarely considered. We review the…
Author(s): Heloise Gibb, J. J. Grubb, O. Decker, Nick P. Murphy, A. E. Franks, J. L. Wood
Year Published:

Wildfires burn annually across the United States (US), which threaten those in close proximity to them. Due to drastic alterations of soil properties and to the land surfaces by these fires, risks of flash floods, debris flows, and severe erosion…
Author(s): Jorge A. Duarte, Andrés D. González, Jonathan J. Gourley
Year Published:

Forested watersheds supply over two thirds of the world's drinking water. The last decade has seen an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires that is threatening these source watersheds, and necessitating more expensive water treatment…
Author(s): Tyler B. Hampton, Simon Lin, Nandita B. Basu
Year Published:

Fires are widespread disturbance events with many implications for different aspects of plant persistence and vegetation properties. Changing fire regimes can profoundly affect vegetation dynamics and ecosystem properties. Recent steep increases in…
Author(s): Fernando A. O. Silveira, Davi R. Rossatto, Hermann Heilmeier, Gerhard E. Overbeck
Year Published:

Spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe subsp. micranthos), diffuse knapweed (C. diffusa), and yellow starthistle (C. solstitialis) are nonnative, invasive forbs that can displace native plants, reduce native plant diversity, reduce native wildlife…
Author(s): Robin J. Innes
Year Published:

Under the influence of climate change, wildfire regimes are expected to intensify and expand to new areas, increasing threats to natural and socioeconomic assets. We explore the environmental and economic implications for the forest sector of…
Author(s): Miguel Rivière, F. Pimont, Philippe Delacote, Julien Ruffault, Antonello Lobianco, Thomas Opitz, Jean-Luc Dupuy
Year Published:

Fire refugia and patchiness are important to the persistence of fire-sensitive species and may facilitate biodiversity conservation in fire-dependent landscapes. Playing the role of ecosystem engineers, large herbivores alter vegetation structure…
Author(s): Megan J. Dornbusch, Ryan Limb, Ilana V. Bloom-Cornelius, R. Dwayne Elmore, John R. Weir, Samuel D. Fuhlendorf
Year Published:

In the western US, wildfires are modifying the structure, composition, and patterns of forested landscapes at rates that far exceed mechanical thinning and prescribed fire treatments. There are conflicting narratives as to whether these wildfires…
Author(s): Derek J. Churchill, Sean M.A. Jeronimo, Paul F. Hessburg, C. Alina Cansler, Nicholas A. Povak, Van R. Kane, James A. Lutz, Andrew J. Larson
Year Published:

Invasive grass species can alter fire regimes, converting native terrestrial ecosystems into non-native, grass-dominated landscapes, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing fire activity and flammable grass expansion. Analyses of this…
Author(s): Emily J. Fusco, Jennifer Balch, Adam L. Mahood, R. Chelsea Nagy, Alexandra D. Syphard, Bethany A. Bradley
Year Published:

While there is a large literature on how individual homeowners perceive location-specific wildfire hazard, there is only one study specific to U.S. family forest owners. Using respondents from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)…
Author(s): Brian Danley, Jesse Caputo, Brett J. Butler
Year Published:

The annual national report of the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, presents forest health status and trends from a national or multistate regional perspective using a variety of sources,…
Author(s): Kevin M. Potter, Barbara L. Conkling
Year Published:

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing is in close proximity to or intermingled with wildland vegetation, is widespread throughout the United States, but it is unclear how this type of housing development affects public lands. We used a…
Author(s): Miranda H. Mockrin, David P. Helmers, Sebastian Martinuzzi, Todd J. Hawbaker, Volker C. Radeloff
Year Published:

Burn severity in forests is commonly assessed in the field with visual ordinal estimates such as the Composite Burn Index (CBI). However, how CBI (a composite of several individual field measures) relates to independent quantitative measures of burn…
Author(s): Saba Saberi, Michelle Agne, Brian J. Harvey
Year Published:

Background: Low-severity prescribed fire is an important tool to manage fire-maintained forests across North America. In dry conifer forests of the western USA, prescribed fire is often used to reduce fuel loads in forests characterized historically…
Author(s): Victoria A. Saab, Quresh Latif, William M. Block, Jonathan G. Dudley
Year Published:

Worldwide, Indigenous peoples are leading the revitalization of their/our cultures through the restoration of ecosystems in which they are embedded, including in response to increasing “megafires.” Concurrently, growing Indigenous-led movements are…
Author(s): Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, Ronald E. Ignace, Marianne B. Ignace, Shannon M. Hagerman, Lori D. Daniels
Year Published:

Warming temperatures and changing weather patterns are causing more frequent and severe disturbances in western North American forests. The increasing length and severity of recent wildfire seasons have annually caused widespread injury to millions…
Author(s): Katherine A. Kitchens, Lucas Peng, Lori D. Daniels, Allan L. Carroll
Year Published:

Of all terrestrial biomes, grasslands are losing the most biodiversity the most rapidly, so there is a critical need to document and learn from large-scale restoration successes. In the Loess Canyons ecoregion of the Great Plains, USA, an…
Author(s): Caleb P. Roberts, Rheinhardt Scholtz, Dillon T. Fogarty, Dirac Twidwell, Thomas L. Jr. Walker
Year Published: