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Displaying 161 - 180 of 1089

In recent decades, climate change has lengthened wildfire seasons globally and doubled the annual area burned. Thus, capturing fire dynamics is critical for projecting Earth system processes in warmer, drier, more fire prone future. Recent advances…
Author(s): Erin J. Hanan, Maureen C. Kennedy, Jianning Ren, Morris C. Johnson, Alistair M. S. Smith
Year Published:

Wildfire is capable of rapidly releasing the energy stored in forests, with the amount of water in live and dead biomass acting as a regulator on the amount and rate of energy release. Here we used temperature and fuel moisture data to examine…
Author(s): Marissa J. Goodwin, Harold S. Zald, Malcolm P. North, Matthew D. Hurteau
Year Published:

This feature explores topics of enduring ecological concern – fire regimes, climate change, and forest management of the North American West. The authors describe the dual challenges of past forest management legacies and fire exclusion confronted…
Author(s): David S. Schimel, Juan C. Corley
Year Published:

Restoration of fire-prone forests is a common practice intended to increase resilience to wildfire, drought, and bark beetles. However, the long-term effects of restoration treatments on understory species, particularly non-native species, are…
Author(s): Woongsoon Jang, Justin S. Crotteau, Yvette K. Ortega, Sharon M. Hood, Christopher R. Keyes, Dean E. Pearson, Duncan C. Lutes, Anna Sala
Year Published:

Fire has always been a driving factor of life on Earth. Now that mankind has definitely joined the other environmental forces in shaping the planet, lots of species are threatened by human-induced variation in fire regimes. Soil-dwelling organisms,…
Author(s): Giacomo Certini, Daniel Moya, Manuel E. Lucas-Borja, Giovanni Mastrolonardo
Year Published:

Climate warming is expected to increase fire frequency in many productive obligate seeder forests, where repeated high-intensity fire can initiate stand conversion to alternative states with contrasting structure. These vegetation–fire interactions…
Author(s): Tegan P. Brown, Assaf Inbar, Thomas J. Duff, Jamie Burton, Philip J. Noske, Patrick N. J. Lane, Gary J. Sheridan
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Prescribed fire is an essential management tool for restoring and maintaining the resilience of fire-dependent ecosystems. Past studies indicated that the current policy environment significantly constrained decision-making around prescribed fire (…
Author(s): Courtney Schultz, Cassandra Moseley, Adell L. Amos, Christopher Bone, Sarah M. McCaffrey
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:

Fire is a powerful environmental disturbance with the ability to shape many biomes worldwide. However, global warming, land-use changes and other anthropogenic factors have strongly altered natural fire regimes worldwide. Despite the growing number…
Author(s): Amanda Gomes dos Anjos, Mirco Solé, Maíra Benchimol
Year Published:

Due to the shifting global climate, the frequency and severity of disturbances are increasing, inevitably causing an increase in disturbances overlapping in time and space. Bark beetle epidemics and wildfires have historically shaped the disturbance…
Author(s): Zoe Schapira, Camille Stevens-Rumann, Donna Shorrock, Chad M. Hoffman, Amy Chambers
Year Published:

Recent increases in destructive wildfires are driving a need for empirical research documenting factors that contribute to structure loss. Existing studies show that fire risk is complex and varies geographically, and the role of vegetation has been…
Author(s): Alexandra D. Syphard, Heather Rustigian-Romsos, Jon E. Keeley
Year Published:

Fuel reduction projects are designed to reduce wildfire hazard, but goals can also include ecological restoration, wildlife habitat enhancement, and forest health improvement. In the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains, ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir forests…
Author(s): Sharon M. Hood, Duncan C. Lutes, Christopher R. Keyes, Anna Sala
Year Published:

Fuel mapping is key to fire propagation risk assessment and regeneration potential. Previous studies have mapped fuel types using remote sensing data, mainly at local-regional scales, while at smaller scales fuel mapping has been based on general-…
Author(s): Elena Aragoneses, Emilio Chuvieco
Year Published:

Expert opinion can be a valuable tool for informed decision making. Concerning wildfire susceptibility reduction at the landscape scale, forest ecosystem experts play a key role in offering advice about appropriate fuel management practices to be…
Author(s): Ana Martins, Ana Novais, José L. Santos, Maria João Canadas
Year Published:

Over the past century the size and severity of wildfires, as well as post-fire recovery processes (e.g., seedling establishment), have been altered from historical levels due to management policies and changing climate. Tree seedling establishment…
Author(s): Darcy H. Hammond, Eva K. Strand, Penelope Morgan, Andrew T. Hudak, Beth A. Newingham
Year Published:

Extreme wildfires are increasing in frequency globally, prompting new efforts to mitigate risk. The ecological appropriateness of risk mitigation strategies, however, depends on what factors are driving these increases. While regional syntheses…
Author(s): Erin J. Hanan, Jianning Ren, Christina Tague, Crystal A. Kolden, John T. Abatzoglou, Ryan R. Bart, Maureen C. Kennedy, Mingliang Liu, Jennifer C. Adam
Year Published:

With the increasing frequency and severity of fire, there is an increasing desire to better manage fuels and minimize, as much as possible, the impacts of fire on soils and other natural resources. Piling and/or burning slash is one method of…
Author(s): William J. Massman
Year Published:

Wildfire behavior predictions typically suffer from significant uncertainty. However, wildfire modeling uncertainties remain largely unquantified in the literature, mainly due to computing constraints. New multifidelity techniques provide a…
Author(s): M.M. Valero, Lluís Jofre, Ricardo Torres
Year Published:

Identifying meaningful measures of ecological change over large areas is dependent on the quantification of robust relationships between ecological metrics and remote sensing products. Over the past several decades, ground observations of wildfire…
Author(s): Joshua J. Picotte, C. Alina Cansler, Crystal A. Kolden, James A. Lutz, Carl H. Key, Nathan C. Benson, Kevin M. Robertson
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Evapotranspiration (ET) accounts for a substantial portion of regional water budgets in much of the southeast and fire-prone western United States (US). Even small changes in ET rates can translate to meaningful shifts in runoff patterns and makes…
Author(s): Natalie M. Collar, Samuel Saxe, Ashley J. Rust, Terri S. Hogue
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