Research and Publications
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We found widespread increases in cover and production of annual grasses and forbs, declines in herbaceous perennial cover, and expansion of trees. Cover and production of annual plants now exceed that of perennials on > 21 million ha of BLM rangeland, marking a fundamental shift in the ecology of these lands. This trend was most dramatic in the Western Cold Desert of Nevada and parts of surrounding states where aboveground production of annuals has more than tripled. Trends in annuals were negatively correlated with trends in bare ground but not with trends in perennials, suggesting that annuals are filling in bare ground rather than displacing perennials. Tree cover increased in half of ecoregions affecting some 44 million ha and underscoring the threat of woodland expansion for western rangelands. A multiscale variance partitioning analysis found that trends often varied the most at the finest spatial scale. This result reinforces the need to combine plot-level field data with moderate-resolution remote sensing to accurately quantify vegetation changes in heterogeneous rangelands. The long-term changes in vegetation on public rangelands argue for a more hands-on approach to management, emphasizing preventative treatment and restoration to preserve rangeland habitat and functioning. Our work shows the power of new remote-sensing tools for monitoring public rangelands and developing effective strategies for adaptive management and conservation.
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This study calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) including (1) fire frequency, (2) time since last burn (TSLB), (3) year of last burn, (4) longest fire-free interval, (5) average fire interval length, and (6) contemporary fire return interval (cFRI).
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This StoryMap is an overview of some of the work undertaken by FireEarth scientists, serving as an introduction to the project. FireEarth is not a standalone endeavor, as the work draws on past and concurrent efforts in the field of wildfire science, which are referenced when applicable.
The StoryMap is organized around 13 main sections: 1) About the FireEarth StoryMap, 2) An Introduction to Wildfire, 3) FireEarth’s Goal, 4) Cascading Consequences of Fire, 5) Erosion and Runoff, 6) Cascading Consequence: Fire Intensity Impacts, 7) Regional Hydro-Ecologic Simulation System (RHESSys), 8) Smoke and Air Pollution, 9) Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Wildfire, 10) Community Adaptation to Fire, 11) Biomimicry: Copying Nature to Coexist with Fire, 12) Conclusion, and 13) All FireEarth-Supported Papers.
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Clearly there is broad consensus that society should manage wildlands to avoid severe wildfire impacts. But how else should a society invest in risk reduction? What are the primary drivers of risk? Where are the dominant impacts we are trying to avoid? What are our primary objectives in managing wildfire? How do we create social change to meet those objectives? These are serious questions that we often get wrong because of our laser focus on public lands forests.
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Evaluating the cumulative ability of fuel treatments to change landscape patterns of fire behavior and effects is challenging. By quantifying fire hazard, followed by evaluating outcomes of wildfires on environmental and ecological indicators and social values, it becomes possible to assess how individual fuel treatments placed within the context of a fuel management regime are effective based on desired conditions that address management objectives. This conceptual framework offers a much-needed middle-ground planning, monitoring, and reporting approach between overly simplistic annual reporting summaries of the area treated, number of fires, and burned area and detailed fire simulation modeling outcomes by putting individual treatments and fires in the context of current and desired vegetative conditions and social values. Our fuel treatment effectiveness framework examines the state of fuels through the lens of fire hazard and connects fuels to subsequent fire behavior and effects over time and space. The framework provides a way to focus regional and national fuel management planning efforts toward creating fuel management regimes that increase social and ecological resilience from wildfire.
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This analysis reveals that investing in collaborative capacity to advance agency-agency partnerships and public engagement might not slow down mitigation, but rather enable agencies to “go slow to go fast” by building the support and mechanisms necessary to increase the pace and scale of mitigation work. Reframing the wildfire problem through a careful analysis of competing frames and the underlying assumptions that privilege particular solutions can reveal a broader suite of solutions that address the range of key barriers.
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Seventeen of the 18 case studies occurred in the western United States, and all were primarily focused on forested ecosystems. Surface fire behavior was more commonly observed in areas treated for fuel reduction than in untreated areas, which managers described as evidence of treatment effectiveness. Reduced fire intensity diminished fire effects and supported fire suppression efforts, while offering the potential to use wildfires as a fuel treatment surrogate.
This study found that wildfires burned more area of non-forest lands than forest lands at the scale of the conterminous and western U.S. and the Department of Interior (DOI). In an agency comparison, 74% of DOI burned area occurred on non-forest lands and 78% of U.S. Forest Service burned area occurred on forested lands. Landscape metrics revealed key differences between forest and non-forest fire patterns and trends in total burned area, burned patch size, distribution, and aggregation over time across the western U.S. Opposite fire patterns emerged between non-forest and forest burns when analyzed at the scale of federal agency jurisdictions. In addition, a fire regime departure analysis comparing current large fire probability with historic fire trends identified certain vegetation types and locations experiencing more fire than historically. These patterns were especially pronounced for cold desert shrublands, such as sagebrush where increases in annual area burned, and fire frequency, size, and juxtaposition have resulted in substantial losses over a twenty-year period.
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Streamflow often increases after fire, but the persistence of this effect and its importance to present and future regional water resources are unclear. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps for the western United States (WUS), where annual forest fire area increased by more than 1,100% during 1984 to 2020. Among 72 forested basins across the WUS that burned between 1984 and 2019, the multibasin mean streamflow was significantly elevated by 0.19 SDs (P < 0.01) for an average of 6 water years postfire, compared to the range of results expected from climate alone. Significance is assessed by comparing prefire and postfire streamflow responses to climate and also to streamflow among 107 control basins that experienced little to no wildfire during the study period. The streamflow response scales with fire extent: among the 29 basins where >20% of forest area burned in a year, streamflow over the first 6 water years postfire increased by a multibasin average of 0.38 SDs, or 30%. Postfire streamflow increases were significant in all four seasons. Historical fire–climate relationships combined with climate model projections suggest that 2021 to 2050 will see repeated years when climate is more fire-conducive than in 2020, the year currently holding the modern record for WUS forest area burned. These findings center on relatively small, minimally managed basins, but our results suggest that burned areas will grow enough over the next 3 decades to enhance streamflow at regional scales. Wildfire is an emerging driver of runoff change that will increasingly alter climate impacts on water supplies and runoff-related risks.
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In this study we illustrate the value of social data compiled at the community scale to guide a local wildfire mitigation and education effort. The four contiguous fire-prone study communities in North Central Washington, US, fall within the same jurisdictional fire service boundary and within one US census block group. Across the four communities, similar attitudes toward wildfire were observed. However, significant differences were found on the measures critical to tailoring wildfire preparation and mitigation programs to the local context such as risk mitigation behaviors, reported barriers to mitigation, and communication preferences across the four communities.