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Displaying 1 - 20 of 35

A long-term study at Lick Creek demonstrates how fuel treatments in dry forests provide benefits beyond mitigating the chance of a high-severity fire.
Author(s): Nehalem C. Clark
Year Published:

Wildland fire shaped the historical ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forest landscapes throughout the West. Fire was also a controlling force in most of the drier vegetation types, ranging from shortgrass prairie to chaparral, scrub oak, and pinyon–…
Author(s): Stephen F. Arno
Year Published:

Northern Eurasia is currently highly sensitive to climate change. Fires in this region can have significant impacts on regional air quality, radiative forcing and black carbon deposition in the Arctic which can accelerate ice melting. Using a MODIS-…
Author(s): Wei Min Hao, Matthew C. Reeves, L. Scott Baggett, Yves Balkanski, Philippe Ciais, Bryce L. Nordgren, Alexander P. Petkov, Rachel E. Corley, Florent Mouillot, Shawn P. Urbanski, Chao Yue
Year Published:

n August 1910, wildfires swept through 3 million acres (1.6 million ha) of heavily forested mountain country in northern Idaho and adjacent Montana. About 85 people perished in the flames, and the Forest Service’s fire protection program was caught…
Author(s): Stephen F. Arno
Year Published:

Aims:Fire regimes are key drivers of ecosystem dynamics and are changing worldwide. Uncertainty about how fire history affects responses to individual fires hampers predictions of fire impacts on important ecosystem functions such as C cycling. Thus…
Author(s): Ingrid J. Slette, Alannah Liebert, Alan K. Knapp
Year Published:

Humans have both intentional and unintentional impacts on their environment, yet identifying the enduring ecological legacies of past small-scale societies remains difficult, and as such, evidence is sparse. The present study found evidence of an…
Author(s): Bruce M. Pavlik, Lisbeth A. Louderback, Kenneth B. Vernon, Peter M. Yaworsky, Cynthia Wilson, Arnold Clifford, Brian F. Codding
Year Published:

Charcoal identification and the quantification of its abundance in sedimentary archives is commonly used to reconstruct fire frequency and the amounts of biomass burning. There are, however, limited metrics to measure past fire temperature and fuel…
Author(s): S. Yoshi Maezumi, William D. Gosling, Judith Kirschner, Manuel Chevalier, Henk L. Cornelissen, Thilo Heinecke, Crystal H. McMichael
Year Published:

Recent wildfires in the western United States have led to substantial economic losses and social stresses. There is a great concern that the new climatic state may further increase the intensity, duration, and frequency of wildfires. To examine…
Author(s): Emily K. Brown, Jiali Wang, Yan Feng
Year Published:

Projected warming of global surface air temperatures will further exacerbate droughts, wildfires, and other agents of ecosystem stress. We use latewood blue intensity from high‐elevation Picea engelmannii to reconstruct late‐summer maximum air…
Author(s): Karen J. Heeter, Maegen L. Rochner, Grant Harley
Year Published:

Fire ecology has a long history of empirical investigation in rangelands. However, the science is inconclusive and incomplete, sparking increasing interest on how to advance the discipline. Here, we introduce a new framework for qualitatively and…
Author(s): Dirac Twidwell, Christine H. Bielski, Rheinhardt Scholtz, Samuel D. Fuhlendorf
Year Published:

An automated burned area extraction routine that attempts to overcome the particular difficulties of remote sensing applications in complex landscapes is presented and tested in the mountainous region of northwest Yunnan, China. In particular, the…
Author(s): David Fornacca, Guopeng Ren, Wen Xiao
Year Published:

Harold Biswell first learned about the benefits of prescribed fire in forest management when he was a Forest Service researcher in Georgia, USA. After he accepted a professorship in the School of Forestry at the University of California, Berkeley,…
Author(s): Scott L. Stephens, Jan W. van Wagtendonk, James K. Agee, Ronald H. Wakimoto
Year Published:

Wildfires in many western North American forests are becoming more frequent, larger, and severe, with changed seasonal patterns. In response, coniferous forest ecosystems will transition toward dominance by fire-adapted hardwoods, shrubs, meadows,…
Author(s): Henriette I. Jager, Jonathan Long, Rachel L. Malison, Brendan P. Murphy, Ashley J. Rust, Luiz G. M. Silva, Rahel Sollmann, Zachary L. Steel, Mark D. Bowen, Jason B. Dunham, Joseph L. Ebersole, Rebecca L. Flitcroft
Year Published:

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research by reflecting on the considerable progress accomplished in select areas of Canadian wildland fire science over the past half century. Specifically, we discuss key…
Author(s): Sean C. P. Coogan, Lori D. Daniels, Den Boychuk, Philip J. Burton, Michael D. Flannigan, Sylvie Gauthier, Victor G. Kafka, Jane Park, B. Mike Wotton
Year Published:

Climate change is expected to increase fire activity in many regions of the globe, but the relative role of human vs. lightning-caused ignitions on future fire regimes is unclear. We developed statistical models that account for the spatiotemporal…
Author(s): Ana M. G. Barros, Michelle A. Day, Haiganoush K. Preisler, John T. Abatzoglou, Meg A. Krawchuk, Rachel M. Houtman, Alan A. Ager
Year Published:

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…
Author(s): Pierre-Luc Couillard, Joanie Tremblay, Martin Lavoie, Serge Payette
Year Published:

Conifer forests of the western US are historically well adapted to wildfires, but current warming is creating novel disturbance regimes that may fundamentally change future forest dynamics. Stand‐replacing fires can catalyze forest reorganization by…
Author(s): M. Allison Stegner, Monica G. Turner, Virginia Iglesias, Cathy L. Whitlock
Year Published:

Aim: Ecological properties governed by threshold relationships can exhibit heightened sensitivity to climate, creating an inherent source of uncertainty when anticipating future change. We investigated the impact of threshold relationships on our…
Author(s): Adam M. Young, Philip E. Higuera, John T. Abatzoglou, Paul A. Duffy, Feng Sheng Hu
Year Published:

Like many of us at the Forest Service, I started my career in fire, and I have always relied on Smokey Bear. Fire prevention is part of our cultural DNA.
Author(s): Vicki Christiansen
Year Published:

Dry mixed-conifer forests are widespread in the interior Pacific Northwest, but their historical fire regimes are poorly characterized, in particular the relative mix of low- and high-severity fire. We reconstructed a multi-century history of fire…
Author(s): Emily K. Heyerdahl, Rachel A. Loehman, Donald A. Falk
Year Published: