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Quantifying historical fire regimes provides important information for managing contemporary forests. Historical fire frequency and severity can be estimated using several methods; each method has strengths and weaknesses and presents challenges for…
Author(s): Jens T. Stevens, Hugh Safford, Malcolm P. North, Jeremy S. Fried, Andrew N. Gray, Peter M. Brown, Christopher R. Dolanc, Solomon Z. Dobrowski, Donald A. Falk, Calvin A. Farris, Jerry F. Franklin, Peter Z. Fule, R. Keala Hagmann, Eric E. Knapp, Alan H. Taylor, Jay D. Miller, Douglas F. Smith, Thomas W. Swetnam
Year Published:

Woody plant expansion is a global phenomenon that alters the spatial distribution of nutrients, biomass, and fuels in affected ecosystems. Altered fuel patterns across the landscape influences ecological processes including fire behavior, fire…
Author(s): Nathan I. Weiner, Eva K. Strand, Stephen C. Bunting, Alistair M. S. Smith
Year Published:

The 2000 Valley Complex wildfire burned in steep montane forests with ash cap soils in western Montana, USA. The effects of high soil burn severity on forest soil hydrologic function were examined using rainfall simulations (100mmh-1 for 1 h) on 0.5…
Author(s): Peter R. Robichaud, Joseph W. Wagenbrenner, Frederick B. Pierson, Kenneth E. Spaeth, Louise E. Ashmun, Corey A. Moffet
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Fire refugia, sometimes referred to as fire islands, shadows, skips, residuals, or fire remnants, are an important element of the burn mosaic, but we lack a quantitative framework that links observations of fire refugia from different environmental…
Author(s): Meg A. Krawchuk, Sandra L. Haire, Jonathan D. Coop, Marc-Andre Parisien, Ellen Whitman, Geneva W. Chong, Carol Miller
Year Published:

Fire regime characteristics in North America are expected to change over the next several decades as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Although some fire regime characteristics (e.g., area burned and fire season length) are relatively well-…
Author(s): Sean A. Parks, Carol Miller, John T. Abatzoglou, Lisa M. Holsinger, Marc-Andre Parisien, Solomon Z. Dobrowski
Year Published:

High-intensity wildfires are one of the leading causes of severe soil erosion in western U.S. watersheds. This erosion can lead to disruptive deposits of sediment in reservoirs and water supply systems. Fuel treatments such as controlled burns and…
Author(s): Brian Cooke
Year Published:

Understanding the causes and consequences of rapid environmental change is an essential scientific frontier, particularly given the threat of climate- and land use-induced changes in disturbance regimes. In western North America, recent widespread…
Author(s): Garrett W. Meigs, Harold S. Zald, John L. Campbell, William S. Keeton, Robert E. Kennedy
Year Published:

In heterogeneous forest landscapes prone to wildfires, accurate classification of the fire regime beyond direct observations and records is difficult. This is in part due to the methods used to reconstruct historical fires in complex, heterogeneous…
Author(s): Vanessa Stretch, Ze'ev Gedalof, Jacklyn Cockburn, Michael F. Pisaric
Year Published:

Historical and presettlement relationships between drought and wildfire have been well documented in much of North America, with forest fire occurrence and area burned clearly increasing in response to drought. Drought interacts with other controls…
Author(s): Jeremy S. Littell, David L. Peterson, Karen L. Riley, Yongqiang Liu, Charles H. Luce
Year Published:

The goal of this paper is to describe the overall meteorological measurement campaign design and methods and present some initial results from analyses of two burn experiments.
Author(s): Craig B. Clements, Neil Lareau, Daisuke Seto, Jonathan Contezac, Braniff Davis, Casey Teske, Thomas J. Zajkowski, Andrew T. Hudak, Benjamin C. Bright, Matthew B. Dickinson, Bret W. Butler, Daniel M. Jimenez, J. Kevin Hiers
Year Published:

Increasingly, objectives for forests with moderate- or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic…
Author(s): Paul F. Hessburg, Thomas A. Spies, David A. Perry, Carl N. Skinner, Alan H. Taylor, Peter M. Brown, Scott L. Stephens, Andrew J. Larson, Derek J. Churchill, Nicholas A. Povak, Peter H. Singleton, Brenda McComb, William J. Zielinski, Brandon M. Collins, R. Brion Salter, Jerry F. Franklin, Gregg M. Riegel
Year Published:

In areas where fire regimes and forest structure have been dramatically altered, there is increasing concern that contemporary fires have the potential to set forests on a positive feedback trajectory with successive reburns, one in which extensive…
Author(s): Michelle Coppoletta, Kyle E. Merriam, Brandon M. Collins
Year Published:

Fire suppression has altered the historical mixed-severity fire regime and homogenised forest structures in Jasper National Park, Canada. We used dendrochronology to reconstruct fire history and assess forest dynamics at 29 sites in the montane…
Author(s): Raphael D. Chavardes, Lori D. Daniels
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With longer and more severe fire seasons predicted, the incidence and extent of fires are expected to increase in western North America. As more area is burned, past wildfires may influence the spread and burn severity of subsequent fires, with…
Author(s): Camille Stevens-Rumann, Susan J. Prichard, Eva K. Strand, Penelope Morgan
Year Published:

Previous research has focused on quantifying fuel loadings and using operational fire behavior models to understand changes in fire severity following MPB outbreaks. In this study however, researchers used direct field measurements taken from the…
Author(s): Northwest Fire Science Consortium
Year Published:

Wildfires shape the distribution and structure of vegetation across the inland northwestern United States. However, fire activity is expected to increase given the current rate of climate change, with uncertain outcomes. A fire impact that has not…
Author(s): Arjan J. H. Meddens, Crystal A. Kolden, James A. Lutz
Year Published:

Most landscape-scale fire severity research relies on correlations between field measures of fire effects and relatively simple spectral reflectance indices that are not direct measures of heat output or changes in plant physiology. Although many…
Author(s): Alistair M. S. Smith, Aaron M. Sparks, Crystal A. Kolden, John T. Abatzoglou, Alan F. Talhelm, Daniel M. Johnson, Luigi Boschetti, James A. Lutz, Kent G. Apostol, Kara M. Yedinak, Wade T. Tinkham, Robert L. Kremens
Year Published:

The environmental effect of extreme soil heating, such as occurs with the complete combustion of large downed wood during wildfires, is a post-fire management concern to forest managers. To address this knowledge gap, we stacked logs to create ‘mega…
Author(s): Jane E. Smith, Ariel D. Cowan, Stephen A. Fitzgerald
Year Published:

Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity. Using a severity metric calculated by modelling the cumulative distribution of differenced Normalized…
Author(s): Joshua J. Picotte, Birgit Peterson, Gretchen Meier, Stephen M. Howard
Year Published:

Increasing rates of natural disturbances under a warming climate raise important questions about how multiple disturbances interact. Escalating wildfire activity in recent decades has resulted in some forests re-burning in short succession, but how…
Author(s): Brian J. Harvey, Daniel C. Donato, Monica G. Turner
Year Published: