Research and Publications
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Abstracts of Recent Papers on Range Management in the West. Prepared by Charlie Clements, Rangeland Scientist, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Reno, NV.
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This study indicates that wildfire smoke leads to a 4 to 6 percent reduction in birthweight, and these effects are most pronounced among mothers exposed to smoke during the second or the third trimesters of pregnancy. It also found that these effects attenuate (or diminish) with respect to distance to a wildfire, becoming ineffectual three miles and further from the burn source. In contrast, it found that even if infants had been close to a wildfire while in utero, there was no statistically significant effect on their birthweight if they were outside the smoke’s path.
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This study quantifies the effect of seasonal reburns on woody surface fuels, forest floor fuels, and understory tree regeneration abundance in six previously thinned ponderosa pine stands in the southern Blue Mountain Ecoregion of Oregon, USA. Each stand consisted of an unburned control, and four season by reburn treatments: spring 5 yr, spring 15 yr, fall 5 yr, and fall 15 yr. All reburn treatments reduced the forest floor depth compared to those areas not burned (controls). Fall burning, regardless of frequency, generated 1000 hr fuel primarily from overstory mortality resulting from the initial entry burns and subsequent snag and branch fall. But, for the other woody fuel types, reburning had minimal impact, regardless of season or frequency. All reburn treatments reduced regeneration survival, but 5 yr fall reburning was most effective in reducing excessive conifer seedlings. Repeated spring or fall reburns following thinning will reduce forest floor depth but, to achieve low woody fuel loads and control excessive conifer regeneration, it may be necessary to conduct reburns using different timing, such as during drier periods when wildfire ignitions by lightning occurred historically.
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Deschutes County, population 175,000, has become a national leader in pursuing such a comprehensive approach. It too experiences regular wildfires. Nevertheless, no house has burned here since 2003, even as fires caused enormous property damage elsewhere in the West — from exurban metropolitan areas to similarly sized counties like Chelan and Oakanogan in Washington, where fires in 2015 burned over 100 structures.
Bob Roper, a retired fire chief of Ventura County, Calif., endorses the approach in general, saying, “Everything that they’re doing can be replicated somewhere else,” even though the strategy may still be unable to completely protect against the damage that increasingly ferocious winds pose in fire season.
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Bureau of Land Management describes the challenge that its staff and a partnership of private landowners, state agencies, conservation groups and more took on when deciding to cooperatively manage a landscape for sage-grouse. What developed is the Bates Hole Juniper Treatment Project.
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Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center’s Two More Chains Summer Issue featured Ted Adams, Assistant Supervisor on the Hells Canyon Wildland Fire Module, Payette National Forest. The article focused on whether or not fire science research is being applied to decision-making on the fire line. The following quote from Ted was highlighted in the article’s opening: “We have all of this research that’s available to us and yet you could argue that a majority of individuals on the fire line are not reading peer-reviewed research and applying it to their decision-making, into their mental models.” After reading the article, Coleen Haskell contacted us. She asked if she could continue the conversation that we started with Ted.
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Spatial wildfire suppression costs regressions have been re-estimated at a more disaggregated level for the nine Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC’s) regions using five years of data for fires involving National Forests. Results of these revised regression determined that only in the California GACCs did mechanical fuel treatment reduce wildfire suppression costs. However, the results of our second major hypothesis tests that fuel treatments, by making wildfires less damaging and easier to control, may reduce property damages (i.e., structures—barns, out buildings, etc. and residences lost) seems to be confirmed for acres treated with prescribed burning. In four out of the seven GACC regions prescribed burning lowered the number of structures damaged by wildfire. The results for mechanical fuel treatment were more mixed, with a significant negative effect in reducing property damages in two of the three regions with a significant coefficient on mechanical fuel treatment. These results are consistent with past research that suggests that for fuel treatments to reduce wildfire suppression costs it may be necessary to substantially increase the amount of area treated.
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Fire Adapted Communities Network published 100 blogs in 2017, each one offering a combination of insight, resources, stories and sometimes even humor. Our authors flooded your inboxes with so much wisdom that your biggest challenge may very well have been making time to read it all. In case you’ve missed a blog, or a few (dozen), here are 17 community wildfire resilience takeaways from the last year.
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This paper presents a case study to demonstrate the ability of the modeling framework to capture the onset and dynamics of a post-fire dust event and then use the modeling framework to estimate particulate matter (PM) emissions from burn scars left by wildfires in U.S. western sagebrush landscapes during 2012. Modeled emissions from 1.2 million ha of burned soil totaled 32.1 Tg of dust as PM10 and 12.8 Tg as PM2.5. Despite the relatively large uncertainties in these estimates and a number of underlying assumptions, these first estimates of annual post-fire dust emissions suggest that post-fire PM emissions could substantially increase current annual PM estimates in the U.S. National Emissions Inventory during high fire activity years. Given the potential for post-fire scars to be a large source of PM, further on-site PM flux measurements are needed to improve emission parameterizations and constrain these first estimates.
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The daily probability of a male sage-grouse moving among leks ranged 0.003 in 2011 to 0.010 in 2013, indicating high daily lek fidelity throughout the season, although there was a 5–42% chance annually a male would move at least once to another lek throughout the season. Interlek movement probabilities were strongly affected by day of year, peaking early in the lek season. Interlek movements were positively associated with elevation. Seasonal interlek movements occurred more frequently than previously reported, and can bias lek counts in early spring as males move from low to high elevation leks, which reinforces interlek movements as a critical component of lek ecology.