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Displaying 1 - 20 of 1082

Background Wildfire is a major proximate cause of historical and ongoing losses of intact big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) plant communities and declines in sagebrush obligate wildlife species. In recent decades, fire return intervals have…
Author(s): Martin C. Holdrege, Daniel Schlaepfer, Kyle Palmquist, Michele R. Crist, Kevin E. Doherty, William Lauenroth, Thomas E. Remington, Karin Riley, Karen C. Short, John C. Tull, Lief A. Wiechman, John B. Bradford
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Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) stands throughout the western United States provide valuable ecosystem services but can be lost via succession from aspen to conifer. Forest managers are cutting conifers, but disposal of cut wood can be…
Author(s): John-Pascal Berrill, Christa M. Dagley, Yoon G. Kim, J. Morgan Varner
Year Published:

Fuel treatments are commonly applied to increase resilience to wildfire in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of western North America. The long-term effects of fuel treatments on forest structure, fuel profiles (amount and configuration of…
Author(s): Don C. Radcliffe, Jonathan D. Bakker, Derek J. Churchill, Ernesto Alvarado, David L. Peterson, Madison M. Laughlin, Brian J. Harvey
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Piñon–juniper (PJ) woodlands are a dominant community type across the Intermountain West, comprising over a million acres and experiencing critical effects from increasing wildfire. Large PJ mortality and regeneration failure after catastrophic…
Author(s): Michala Phillips, Cara Lauria, Tova Spector, John B. Bradford, Catherine A. Gehring, Brooke B. Osborne, Armin Howell, Edmund E. Grote, Renee J. Rondeau, Gillian M. Trimber, Ben A. Robinson, Sasha C. Reed
Year Published:

Trees use nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs) to support many functions, including recovery from disturbances. However, NSC’s importance for recovery following fire and whether NSC depletion contributes to post-fire delayed mortality are largely…
Author(s): Charlotte C. Reed, Sharon M. Hood
Year Published:

Background: The capacity of forest fuel treatments to moderate the behavior and severity of subsequent wildfires depends on weather and fuel conditions at the time of burning. However, in-depth evaluations of how treatments perform are limited…
Author(s): Emily G. Brodie, Eric E. Knapp, Wesley R. Brooks, Stacy Drury, Martin W. Ritchie
Year Published:

Background: A clear understanding of the connectivity, structure, and composition of wildland fuels is essential for effective wildfire management. However, fuel typing and mapping are challenging owing to a broad diversity of fuel conditions and…
Author(s): Jennifer N. Baron, Paul F. Hessburg, Marc-Andre Parisien, Gregory A. Greene, Sarah E. Gergel, Lori D. Daniels
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Wildland fire incident commanders make wildfire response decisions within an increasingly complex socio-environmental context. Threats to human safety and property, along with public pressures and agency cultures, often lead commanders to emphasize…
Author(s): Molly C. Daniels, Kristin H. Braziunas, Monica G. Turner, Ting-Fung Ma, Karen C. Short, Adena R. Rissman
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Fuel and restoration treatments seeking to mitigate the likelihood of uncharacteristic high-severity wildfires in forests with historically frequent, low-severity fire regimes are increasingly common, but long-term treatment effects on fuels,…
Author(s): Sharon M. Hood, Justin S. Crotteau, Cory Cleveland
Year Published:

Background Prescribed fire is a critical tool for building resilience to changing fire regimes. Policymakers can accelerate the development of effective, adaptation-oriented fire governance by learning from other jurisdictions. Aims We analyse…
Author(s): Phillipa C. McCormack, Rebecca K. Miller, Jan McDonald
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Background Fifty years after its initial publication, Rothermel’s model continues to underpin many operational fire modelling tools. Past authors have, however, suggested a possible oversensitivity of the Rothermel model to fuel depth in certain…
Author(s): Zakary Campbell-Lochrie, Michael R. Gallagher, Nick Skowronski, Rory Hadden
Year Published:

Standing dead tree stems (snags) become abundant following disturbances like bark beetle outbreaks and stand-replacing fire. Snags are an important element of wildlife habitat, and when they eventually fall can injure or damage people and…
Author(s): Nathan G. Kiel, William H. Romme, Monica G. Turner
Year Published:

Background: Potential Wildfire Operational Delineations (PODs) were developed as a pre-season planning tool to promote safe and effective fire response. Past research on PODs has identified uses in an incident management context. There has been…
Author(s): William C. Buettner, Tyler A. Beeton, Courtney Schultz, Michael D. Caggiano, S. Michelle Greiner
Year Published:

Background: Wildland firefighters have physically and psychologically demanding jobs that can result in social, economic and health-related stress. Previous studies have examined the physiological and physical effects of a career in wildland fire,…
Author(s): Rachel M. Granberg, Ting Shen, Seth W. Pearson, Robin M. Verble
Year Published:

The use of masticated tree debris to protect burned soil from post-fire erosion is not common and very little is known about its effectiveness in reducing the risk of erosion after fire. The main objective of this research was to assess the effects…
Author(s): Cristina Fernández
Year Published:

Background Sagebrush shrublands in the Great Basin, USA, are experiencing widespread increases in wildfire size and area burned resulting in new policies and funding to implement fuel treatments. However, we lack the spatial data needed to optimize…
Author(s): Jeanne C. Chambers, Jessi L. Brown, Matthew C. Reeves, Eva K. Strand, Lisa M. Ellsworth, Claire Tortorelli, Alexandra K. Urza, Karen C. Short
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We developed and applied a spatial optimization algorithm to prioritize forest and fuel management treatments within a proposed linear fuel break network on a 0.5 million ha Western US national forest. The large fuel break network, combined with the…
Author(s): Pedro Belavenutti, Alan A. Ager, Michelle A. Day, Woodam Chung
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Background: Plant flammability is an important factor in fire behaviour and post-fire ecological responses. There is consensus about the broad attributes (or axes) of flammability but little consistency in their measurement. Aims: We sought to…
Author(s): Jane G. Cawson, Jamie E. Burton, Bianca J. Pickering, Vana Demetriou, Alexander I. Filkov
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For the past 20 to 30 years, a wildfire crisis has been building in the West as wildfires have grown in size, duration, and destructivity despite highly effective suppression responses by the USDA Forest Service and others in the wildland fire…
Author(s): Hutch Brown
Year Published:

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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