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Our pinyon jay abundance model allowed abundance relationships with pinyon pine and juniper to vary by ecoregion, thereby accounting for potential regional differences in habitat associations. We found pinyon jay abundance was generally positively associated with pinyon pine and juniper cover; however, habitat relationships varied by ecoregion. Additionally, we found positive associations between jay abundance and grass cover, sagebrush cover, and percent bare ground. Our results agree with prior research suggesting mechanical removal of pinyon pine and juniper trees for sagebrush restoration or fuel treatments may negatively affect pinyon jay. Managers wishing to reduce pinyon and juniper tree cover without negatively affecting pinyon jay may benefit from targeting sites where both large-scale distribution models and our local habitat relationships suggest pinyon jay are likely to occur in low numbers. Additionally, our modeled relationships indicate restoration that increases grass cover, sagebrush cover, and bare ground, while maintaining pinyon and (or) juniper cover, may lead to increased local densities of pinyon jay.
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Respondents reported that while flexible federal policy and interagency guidance was important, suitable landscape conditions, organizational capacity, support from national and regional leadership, updated management plans, increased monitoring capacity, and adequate performance measures also influence the decision to use OTFS strategies.
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Drawing insights from the Australian and Canadian contexts where governments are restoring lands and reconciling with the laws and governance of Indigenous Peoples, we illustrate how IFS interacts with the state. We do this in two ways. Figure 1 shows that the state has three general strategies for dealing with IFS: avoidance (ignoring IFS), coping strategies (carefully considering and sometimes accommodating IFS), and learning (embracing and accommodating IFS). We document that post-wildfire, there are affective drivers that move the state’s approach from avoidance to learning; however, over time, as public attention shifts away from alternatives, the strategy moves back to either avoidance or coping strategies (where the state is required to engage with IFS, but cannot fully embrace it because of institutional, tenure, or jurisdictional issues, among other constraints). Figure 2 documents the six coping strategies available to bureaucracies in dealing with IFS, which either institutionalize, partially institutionalize, or do not institutionalize IFS. Each of these pathways has implications for IFS, and the manuscript details the effects on IFS practices, and the impacts for people and landscapes.
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Enactment of the Clean Air Act (CAA), Endangered Species Act (ESA), and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), three of the primary federal environmental laws, all coincided with the height of fire suppression and exclusion in the United States. These laws fail to acknowledge or account for the importance of fire in many fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems, particularly in the American west, or the imperative for fire restoration to improve resiliency and reduce wildfire risk as identified by western science and Indigenous knowledge. We review the statutory and regulatory provisions of these federal laws to identify how the existing policy framework misaligns with the unique role of fire in ecosystems and with Tribal sovereignty, identify specific barriers and disincentives to beneficial fire use, and propose specific policy reforms.
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We found three-fold differences in mean Daily Area Burned among 10 North American ecoregions, ranging from 260 ha day-1 in the Marine West Coast Forests to 751 ha day-1 in Mediterranean California. Ecoregional extreme thresholds ranged from 3,829 ha day-1 to 16,626 ha day-1, relative to a continental threshold of 7,173 ha day-1. The ~3% of events classified as extreme cumulatively account for 16–55% of total area burned among ecoregions. We observed four-fold differences in mean fire duration, ranging from 2.7 days in the Great Plains to 10.5 days in Northwestern Forested Mountains. Regions with shorter fire durations also had greater daily area burned, suggesting a paradigm of fast-growing short-duration fires in some regions and slow-growing long-duration fires elsewhere. CWD had a weak positive relationship with spread rate and extreme thresholds, and there was no pattern for AET. Discussion: Regions with shorter fire durations had greater daily area burned, suggesting a paradigm of fast-growing short-duration fires in some regions and slow-growing long-duration fires elsewhere. Although climatic conditions can set the stage for ignition and influence vegetation and fuels, finer-scale mechanisms likely drive variation in daily spread. Daily fire progression offers valuable insights into the regional and seasonal distributions of extreme single-day spread events, and how these events shape net fire effects.
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Potential drivers of current carbon included harvest, wildfire, insect and disease, topography, and climate. Using random forests, we evaluated driver importance and relationships with current live and dead carbon within ecoregions. We assessed trends using linear models. Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Southwest (SW) ecoregions were most and least carbon dense, respectively. Climate was an important carbon driver in the SW and Lower Rockies. Fire reduced live and increased dead carbon, and was most important in the Upper Rockies and California. No ecoregion was unaffected by fire. Harvest and private ownership reduced carbon, particularly in the PNW. Since 2005, live carbon declined across much of the western US, likely from drought and fire. Carbon has increased in PNW ecoregions, likely recovering from past harvest, but recent record fire years may alter trajectories. Our results provide insight into western US forest carbon function and future vulnerabilities, which is vital for effective climate change mitigation strategies.
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We examined management effects on bee abundance and other insect pollinators on grazed and idle sagebrush rangelands in central Montana, USA. From 2016 to 2018, we sampled pollinators on lands enrolled in rest-rotation grazing, unenrolled grazing lands, and geographically separate idle lands without grazing for over a decade. Bare ground covered twice as much area (15% vs. 7) with half the litter (12% vs. 24) on grazed than idle regardless of enrollment. Bee pollinators were 2–3 times more prevalent in grazed than idle in 2016–2017. In 2018, bees were similar among grazed and idled during an unseasonably wet and cool summer that depressed pollinator catches; captures of secondary pollinators was similar among treatments 2 of 3 study years. Ground-nesting bees (94.6% of total bee abundance) were driven by periodic grazing that maintained bare ground and kept litter accumulations in check. In contrast, idle provided fewer nesting opportunities for bees that were mostly solitary, ground-nesting genera requiring unvegetated spaces for reproduction. Managed lands supported higher bee abundance that evolved with bison grazing on the eastern edge of the sagebrush ecosystem. Our findings suggest that periodic disturbance may enhance pollinator habitat, and that rangelands may benefit from periodic grazing by livestock.
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Prescribed fire implementation is subject to multiple constraints, including the number of days characterized by weather and vegetation conditions conducive to achieving desired outcomes. Here, we quantify observed and projected trends in the frequency and seasonality of western United States prescribed fire days. We find that while ~2 C of global warming by 2060 will reduce such days overall (−17%), particularly during spring (−25%) and summer (−31%), winter (+4%) may increasingly emerge as a comparatively favorable window for prescribed fire especially in northern states.
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The research presented in this article utilized mixed-method, residential surveys of property owners in Kittitas County, Washington, to explore influences on support for wildfire mitigation requirements and performance of voluntary mitigations on private lands. We found a high degree of variability in support for regulatory approaches, including relatively low levels of support for building or retrofitting regulations and a moderate level of support for vegetation management regulations. Perceptions about wildfire risk sources or public land management, past performance of wildfire mitigation actions, and support for shared, locally managed mitigations all correlated with support for differing regulatory approaches. We also found that performance of voluntary mitigation actions correlated with increasing wildfire program participation, differed among part-time or full- time residents, and were influenced by proximity to nearby property boundaries. Our results suggest that the most supported strategy in the study area may be the establishment of local, tax funded districts that encourage voluntary mitigation actions tailored to local circumstances. We conclude the paper by comparing our results to existing lessons from wildfire social science.
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arge-scale disturbances, such as megafires, motivate restoration at equally large extents. Measuring the survival and growth of individual plants plays a key role in current efforts to monitor restoration success. However, the scale of modern restoration (e.g., >10,000 ha) challenges measurements of demographic rates with field data. In this study, we demonstrate how unoccupied aerial system (UAS) flights can provide an efficient solution to the tradeoff of precision and spatial extent in detecting demographic rates from the air.