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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, Lisa M. Holsinger, Carol Miller, Cara R. Nelson
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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.…
Author(s): Corey L. Gucker
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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…
Author(s): Diane M. Smith
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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…
Author(s): Marc D. Meyer
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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…
Author(s): Penelope Morgan, Emily K. Heyerdahl, Carol Miller, Aaron M. Wilson, Carly E. Gibson
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