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In December 2022, twenty-one experts from land management agencies, Tribes, and organizations from across the country convened at the Wilderness and Fire Workshop in Gunnison, Colorado to consider the effects of over a century of fire exclusion on…
Author(s): Center for Public Lands Western Colorado University, USFS Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute,
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This is a summary from the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Fire Science Workshop held June 27-28, 2023. It summarizes discussion points from the first day's breakout groups as well as some key discussion points from…
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Wilderness areas are important natural laboratories for scientists and managers working to understand fire. In the last half-century, shifts in the culture and policy of land management agencies have facilitated the management practice of letting…
Author(s): Mark R. Kreider, Melissa Jaffe, Julia Berkey, Sean A. Parks, Andrew J. Larson
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All wildfires in the United States are managed, but the strategies used to manage them vary by region and season. “Managed wildfire” is a response strategy to naturally ignited wildfires; it does not prioritize full suppression and allows the fire…
Author(s): Rachel Bean, Alexander M. Evans
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This is a synthesis of the research priorities from the 2023 Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Fire Science Workshop as identified by participants. 
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Federal land managers in the United States are permitted to manage wildfires with strategies other than full suppression under appropriate conditions to achieve natural resource objectives. However, policy and scientific support for “managed…
Author(s): Emily Jane Davis, Heidi Huber-Stearns, Michael D. Caggiano, Darren McAvoy, Anthony S. Cheng, A. Deak, A. Evans
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Suppression of most wildland fire ignitions has defined fire management in the United States since 1935. These past suppression activities, along with climate change impacts and other factors, have resulted in longer fire seasons and increased…
Author(s): Julia Berkey, Carol Miller, Andrew J. Larson
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here is increasing discussion in the academic and agency literature, as well as popular media, about the need to address the existing deficit of beneficial fire on landscapes. One approach allowable under United States federal wildland fire policy…
Author(s): Stephen D. Fillmore, Sarah M. McCaffrey, Alistair M. S. Smith
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Wilderness areas offer value to society as a source of scientific information. We used fire perimeter records from the upper South Fork Flathead River watershed (Montana) to characterize the area burned one or more times during three periods: the…
Author(s): Andrew J. Larson, Julia Berkey, Colin T. Maher, Wyatt Trull, R. Travis Belote, Carol Miller
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Nearly a century of fire suppression in most forested land of the United States has limited researchers’ ability to construct and rigorously test conceptual models of forest structural development in mixed-conifer ecosystems. As a result, land…
Author(s): Julia Berkey, R. Travis Belote, Colin T. Maher, Andrew J. Larson
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Protected areas (PAs) play an important role in maintaining the biodiversity and ecological processes of the site. One of the greatest challenges for the PA management in several biomes in the world is wildfires. The objective of this work was to…
Author(s): João Flávio Costa dos Santos, Joyce Machado Nunes Romeiro, José Batuíra de Assis, Fillipe Tamiozzo Pereira Torres, José Marinaldo Gleriani
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Wildland fire suppression practices in the western United States are being widely scrutinized by policymakers and scientists as costs escalate and large fires increasingly affect social and ecological values. One potential solution is to change…
Author(s): Alan A. Ager, Ana M. G. Barros, Haiganoush K. Preisler, Michelle A. Day, Thomas A. Spies, John D. Bailey, John P. Bolte
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Multidecadal trends in areas burned with high severity shape ecological effects of fires, but most assessments are limited to ∼30 years of satellite data. We analysed the proportion of area burned with high severity, the annual area burned with high…
Author(s): Penelope Morgan, Andrew T. Hudak, Ashley Wells, Sean A. Parks, Scott L. Baggett, Benjamin C. Bright, Patricia Green
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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…
Author(s): Vita Wright
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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…
Author(s): Cameron Naficy, Eric G. Keeling, Peter Landres, Paul F. Hessburg, Thomas T. Veblen, Anna Sala
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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…
Author(s): Carol Miller, Gregory H. Aplet
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Wildland fires, especially wildfires, are not commonly thought of as fuel treatments; however, because fires consume fuels and alter vegetation structure, they can serve as fuel treatments similar to more traditional means (e.g., mechanical or…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, Corey L. Gucker
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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…
Author(s): Kevin M. Barnett, Carol Miller, Tyron J. Venn
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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,…
Author(s): Elers Koch
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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…
Author(s): Dave Campbell, Robert W. Mutch
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