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Over the past several decades, size and extent of wildfires have been increasing in the western United States (Westerling et al. 2006; Littell et al. 2009). As the number and size of recent wildfires increases across landscapes, fire managers are…
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Sagebrush is one of the most imperiled ecosystems in western North America, having lost about half of its original 62 million hectare extent. Annual grass invasions are known to be increasing wildfire occurrence and burned area, but the lasting…
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Analysis and 14C dating of charcoal fragments ≥2 mm buried in mineral soils make it possible to obtain a stand-scale portrait of Holocene fires that occurred in well-drained, fire-prone environments, as well as changes in forest stand composition…
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High severity fire: evaluating its key drivers and mapping its probability across western US forests
Wildland fire is a critical process in forests of the western United States (US). Variation in fire behavior, which is heavily influenced by fuel loading, terrain, weather, and vegetation type, leads to heterogeneity in fire severity across…
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Paleofire research is the study of past fire regimes using a suite of proxies (frequency, area burned, severity, intensity, etc.). Charcoal preserved in sedimentary archives constitutes one of the most ubiquitous measures of past fire regimes along…
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Historic frequency and severity of fire in whitebark pine forests of the Cascade Mountain Range, USA
Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) is a foundation species of high elevation forest ecosystems in the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. We examined fire evidence on 55 fire history sites located in the…
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Wildfire is a dominant disturbance agent in forest ecosystems, shaping important biogeochemical processes including net carbon (C) balance. Long-term monitoring and chronosequence studies highlight a resilience of biogeochemical properties to large…
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Picture a tranquil landscape with undulating topography, idyllic streams, scenic glades, and verdant vegetation. Left to its own devices, this landscape would eventually become dominated by late successional communities that would slowly shift in…
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Wildfire is an important disturbance in ponderosa pine communities in the Black Hills and surrounding areas. Effective management of these communities requires an understanding of historical fire regimes. This review provides a synthesis of the…
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The effect of topography on wildfire distribution in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of debate. We suspect the size of the study area, and the assumption fire return intervals are distributed as a Weibull distribution used in many previous…
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On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research. Established in 1915 to centralize and elevate the pursuit of research throughout the agency, the…
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The objectives of this study were to identify whitebark pine fire-climate interactions, and tree establishment and mortality patterns in a landscape context. Specific objectives were to : 1) develop a whitebark pine tree-ring chronology to date fire…
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Humans affect fire regimes by providing ignition sources in some cases, suppressing wildfires in others, and altering natural vegetation in ways that may either promote or limit fire. In North America, several studies have evaluated the effects of…
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Humans have a profound effect on fire regimes by increasing the frequency of ignitions. Although ignition is an integral component of understanding and predicting fire, to date fire models have not been able to isolate the ignition location, leading…
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Fire frequency is assumed to have exerted a strong influence on historical forest communities in the inland Pacific Northwest. This study reconstructs forest structure and composition in the year 1890 and fire frequency from 1760 to 1890 at 10 sites…
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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…
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Seasonal changes in the climatic potential for very large wildfires (VLWF > or = 50,000 ac ~20,234 ha) across the western contiguous United States are projected over the 21st century using generalized linear models and downscaled climate…
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Wildfire in western U.S. federally managed forests has increased substantially in recent decades, with large (>1000 acre) fires in the decade through 2012 over five times as frequent (450 percent increase) and burned area over ten times as great…
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We used a database capturing large wildfires (> 405 ha) in the western U.S. to document regional trends in fire occurrence, total fire area, fire size, and day of year of ignition for 1984-2011. Over the western U.S. and in a majority of…
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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…
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