Research and Publications
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The monitoring for adaptive management of the 2015 Soda Megafire area (113,000 Ha) sampled up to 2000 observation plots in each of five post-fire years, and provided important insights on challenges, solutions, and insights that can be applied to monitoring future burned areas.
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This study involved a review of available spatial products to assess advances in, and barriers to, applying contemporary model-based maps to support rangeland management. We found dozens of regional data products describing cheatgrass or annual herbaceous cover and few maps describing ventenata or medusahead. Over the past decade, IAG spatial data increased in spatial and temporal resolution and increasingly used response variables that indicate the severity of infestation such as percent cover. Despite improvements, use of such data is limited by the time required to find, compare, understand, and translate model-based maps into management strategy. There is also a need for products with higher spatial resolution and accuracy. In collaboration with a multipartner stakeholder group, we identified key considerations that guide selection of IAG spatial data products for use by land managers and other users. On the basis of these considerations, we discuss issues that contribute to a research-implementation gap between users and product developers and suggest future directions for improved development of management-ready spatial products.
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This study tested four flight frequencies during the growing season. Classification accuracy based on reference data increased by 5–10% between a single flight and scenarios including all conducted flights. Accuracy increased from 50.6% to 61.4% at the drier site, while at the more mesic/densely vegetated site, we found an increase of 59.0% to 64.4% between a single and multiple flights over the growing season. Peak green-up varied by 2–4 weeks within the scenes, and sparse vegetation classes had only a short detectable window of active photosynthesis; therefore, a single flight could not capture all vegetation that was active across the growing season. The multi-temporal analyses identified differences in the seasonal timing of green-up and senescence within herbaceous and sagebrush classes. Multiple UAV measurements can identify the fine-scale phenological variability in complex mixed grass/shrub vegetation.
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Post-fire seeding has been widely implemented in the semiarid Great Basin because natural vegetation recovery may be compromised. Non-native species are often seeded to rapidly establish perennial cover and compete with invasive annuals. We asked whether seeding treatments with different amounts of native and non-native species followed different successional trajectories and whether they became more similar to reference communities over time. We considered restoration implications of seed mix choices and reference community options involving: (a) local unburned vegetation; and (b) reference states mapped by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) based on soil-vegetation associations.
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This brief provides recommendations for managers thinking about using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (drone) for post-fire seeding. This project was designed to test the technology, learn about the logistics associated with drone seeding, and share lessons learned to improve drone use in future projects. Partnerships made this project possible.
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A Preparedness Guide for Wildland Firefighters and Their Families provides honest information, resources, and conversation starters to give you, the wildland firefighter, tools that will be helpful in preparing yourself and your support network for the realities of your career. This publication does not set any standards or mandates; rather, it is intended to provide you with helpful information to bridge the gap between wellness and managing the unexpected. This publication helps firefighters and support networks such as family members, significant others, and friends prepare for and respond to planned and unplanned situations in the world of wildland firefighting. Some sections of this guide are written for the firefighter, while other sections are intended to be shared directly with support networks
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Restoration efforts can be negatively impacted by increases in small mammals. These small mammals consume larger seeds of the native plant community, hampering the establishment of new plants and the recovery of existing plants. An approach to overcome this problem is to coat seeds being used for restoration projects with seed predation deterrents. RMRS researchers have identified substances successful in deterring seed predation, including chili powder, neem oil, and activated carbon. In this study, the increased seed recruitment success was enough to offset the cost of coating the seeds.
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Land management and fire management goals are increasingly framed in terms of resilience, in part due to the combined impacts of climate change, land-use change, and legacies of land management. Implicit in this framing is the recognition that resilience to wildfire involves both ecological and social dimensions. Discussions surrounding resilience often do not explicitly articulate what resources should or must be resilient to wildfire, and seldom do they make explicit for whom resilience is important. Land managers need to understand and identify which resources their communities want to be resilient to wildfire before they can outline specific actions that could be taken to support resilience for those resources. We detail an approach for bringing together land and resource managers, community institutions, and other stakeholders—those people for whom resilience is important—to achieve these objectives. We describe a series of exercises used for a workshop but present them here in a more generic form that could be adapted to a variety of landscapes, audiences, and formats.
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We propose an integrated fire management approach in which all management activities before, during, and after wildfire are synergistic and improve long-term ecosystem response to fire. Harney County Wildfire Collaborative is adapting the Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) framework to improve fire outcomes and promote values at risk in the Stinkingwater Mountains pilot project area. The PODs framework serves to promote a broader geographic strategy for addressing the underlying causes of frequent and severe wildfires in the sagebrush ecosystem.
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This study shows that night-time fre intensity has increased, which is linked to hotter and drier nights. Our findings are based on global satellite observations of daytime and night-time fire detections and corresponding hourly climate data, from which we determine landcover-specific thresholds of VPD (VPDt), below which fire detections are very rare (less than 95 per cent modelled chance). Globally, daily minimum VPD increased by 25 per cent from 1979 to 2020. Across burnable lands, the annual number of flammable night-time hours—when VPD exceeds VPDt—increased by 110 hours, allowing five additional nights when flammability never ceases. Across nearly one-fifth of burnable lands, flammable nights increased by at least one week across this period. Globally, night fires have become 7.2 per cent more intense from 2003 to 2020, measured via a satellite record.