Research and Publications
View paper.
On average, one third of the area burned by predicted wildfires was non-local, meaning that the source ignition was on a different land tenure. Land tenures with smaller parcels tended to receive more incoming fire on a proportional basis, while the largest fires were generated from ignitions in national parks, national forests, public and tribal lands. Among the 11 western States, the amount and pattern of cross-boundary fire varied substantially in terms of which land tenures were mostly exposed, by whom and to what fire sizes. We also found spatial variability in terms of community exposure among States, and more than half of the predicted structure exposure was caused by ignitions on private lands or within the wildland-urban interface areas. This study addressed gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments, that do not explicitly consider cross-boundary fire transmission and do not identify the sources of fire. The results can be used by State, Federal, and local fire planning organizations to help improve risk mitigation programs.
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Comparisons of observed and simulated historical area burned indicate simulated future fire vulnerability could be underestimated by 3% in the Sierra Nevada and overestimated by 3% in the Rocky Mountains. Projections show that water‐limited forests in the Rocky Mountains, Southwest, and Great Basin regions will be the most vulnerable to future drought‐related mortality, and vulnerability to future fire will be highest in the Sierra Nevada and portions of the Rocky Mountains. High carbon‐density forests in the Pacific coast and western Cascades regions are projected to be the least vulnerable to either drought or fire. Importantly, differences in climate projections lead to only 1% of the domain with conflicting low and high vulnerability to fire and no area with conflicting drought vulnerability. Our drought vulnerability metrics could be incorporated as probabilistic mortality rates in earth system models, enabling more robust estimates of the feedbacks between the land and atmosphere over the 21st century.
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Here, we show >20 yr were required for adaptive differences to emerge among 13 populations of a widespread shrub (sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata ssp wyomingensis) collected from around the western United States and planted into common gardens. Additionally, >10 yr were required for greater survival of local populations, that is, local adaptation, to become evident. Variation in survival was best explained by the combination of populations’ home ecoregion combined with grouping of minimum temperature and aridity.
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The variation in predictive power among a suite of modeling frameworks underscores the importance of a model comparison and refinement approach that evaluates multiple models and data groups, and selects variables based on their contribution to predictive power. The enhanced understanding of factors influencing restoration outcomes accomplished by this framework has the potential to aid the adaptive management process for improving future restoration outcomes.
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The agreement between Landsat and phenocam Normalized Difference Vegetation Index for short-statured plant communities of the Great Basin, shows promise for monitoring landscape and regional-level plant phenology across large areas and time periods, with phenocams providing a more comprehensive understanding of plant phenology at finer spatial scales, and Landsat extending the historical record of observations.
View manual.
The purpose of this design manual is to provide restoration practitioners with guidelines for implementing a subset of low-tech tools—namely beaver dam analogues (BDAs) and post-assisted log structures (PALS)—for initiating process-based restoration in structurally-starved riverscapes. While the concept of process-based restoration in riverscapes has been advocated for at least two decades, details and specific examples on how to implement it remain sparse. Here, we describe ‘low-tech process-based restoration’ (LT-PBR) as a practice of using simple, low unit-cost, structural additions (e.g. wood and beaver dams) to riverscapes to mimic functions and initiate specific processes.
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The most significant landscape variable affecting survival was soil taxonomic subgroup, with much lower survival where buried restrictive layers reduce deep water infiltration. Survival also decreased with greater slope steepness, exotic annual grass cover, and burn severity. Survival was optimal where perennial bunchgrasses comprised 8–14% of total cover. These soil, topographic, and community condition factors revealed through monitoring of landscape-level treatments can be used to explain the success of plantings and to strategically plan future restoration projects.
View brief.
Estimates of historical fire regime parameters in mountain big sagebrush communities can be compared with current fire regimes and trends to establish general guidelines for ecological restoration. A synthesis of information on historical patterns and contemporary changes in fuels and fire regimes in mountain big sagebrush communities is available in the Fire Effects Information System (FEIS). This research brief summarizes information from that FEIS Fire Regime Synthesis.
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Humans are the source of 84 percent of wildfires, and not all are intentional. Often they come from vehicle accidents in dry landscapes. In fact, over the last 20 years, 11 of the 50 largest wildfires in the U.S. have occurred in the Great Basin. From 2000 to 2018, approximately 15 million acres of sagebrush burned primarily in the Great Basin, and approximately 9 million of those acres burned from 2014 to 2018 alone, said Michele Crist, a landscape ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
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Overall, greater sage-grouse selected areas that were 1) distant from trees, paved roads, and powerlines; 2) high in elevation; 3) near treatment edges; and 4) consisting of gentle slopes. Post-treatment sage-grouse showed stronger selection for treatments and treatment edges than did pretreatment sage-grouse. Maps predicting probability of selection by brood-rearing sage-grouse showed increased use in and around mechanically treated areas. This altered pattern of selection by sage-grouse with broods suggests mechanical treatments may be a suitable way to increase use of mountain big sagebrush during the brooding period.