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This study shows that simultaneous wildfire is at least as correlated with preparedness levels as other burned area measures and identify changes in simultaneous wildfire occurrence within the western and southern United States. Seasonal variation and spatial autocorrelation in simultaneous wildfire occurrence provide evidence of coupling of wildfire activity in portions of the western United States. Best-approximating models of simultaneity suggest that high levels of simultaneous wildfire often coincided with low fuel moisture and high levels of lightning occurrence. Model uncertainty was high in some contexts but, with only a few exceptions, there was strong evidence that the best model should include both a dryness and lightning indicator.
Across the western US, severe wildfires fueled by tinder-dry vegetation have already burned more than 3.2 million hectares (8 million acres) — an area the size of Maryland — as of the end of October, 2020, and nearly six times that area burned this year in Australia. And even though neither country’s worst-ever fire year is not yet over, concerns are already mounting regarding the next hazard these regions will face: dangerous and destructive debris flows.
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This study showed that all models provided higher predictive accuracy than chance, with an average AUC across the 20 forage species of 0.84 for distal and proximal variables and 0.81 for proximal variables only. This indicated that the addition of distal variables improved model performance. We validated the models using two independent datasets from two regions of Idaho. We found that predicted forage species occurrence was on average within 10% of observed occurrence at both sites. However, predicted occurrences had much less variability between habitat patches than the validation data, implying that the models did not fully capture fine-scale heterogeneity. We suggest that future efforts will benefit from additional fine resolution (i.e., less than 30 m) environmental predictor variables and greater accounting of environmental disturbances (i.e., wildfire, grazing) in the training data. Our approach was novel both in methodology and spatial scale (i.e., resolution and extent). Our models can inform ungulate nutrition by predicting the occurrence of forage species and aide habitat management strategies to improve nutritional quality.
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This study developed a conceptual model that describes the possible uses of science in fire management (perception, planning, forecasting, implementation, assessment, communication, and policy), common barriers to science use (lack of science, uncertainty, funding/capacity, conflict), common facilitators to fire science use (collaboration, trust, boundary organizations, co-production), and factors that can act as facilitators or barriers to science use depending on their presence or absence (awareness, accessibility, relevance). In the context of our conceptual model, we reviewed 67 papers that examined fire science use between 1986 and 2019.
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Approximately 75% of models tested had acceptable, excellent, or outstanding predictive ability. The models that performed poorly were primarily models predicting stem mortality of angiosperms or tree mortality of thin-barked conifers. This suggests that different approaches—such as different model forms, better estimates of bark thickness, and additional predictors—may be warranted for these taxa. Future data collection and research should target the geographical and taxonomic data gaps and poorly performing models identified in this study. Our evaluation of post-fire tree mortality models is the most comprehensive effort to date and allows users to have a clear understanding of the expected accuracy in predicting tree death from fire for 44 species.
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This study’s objective was to determine whether remnant/unburned sagebrush patches contribute to sagebrush recovery in surrounding burned areas surrounding them.
Key Findings:
While conventional wisdom is that sagebrush seeds remain close to the mother plant, we found that a measurable percentage of seeds travel up to tens of meters. Remnant patches of sagebrush after fire could contribute to natural regeneration in surrounding landscapes. However, seed arrival was highly variable between sites and work remains to be done to predict where natural regeneration will be sufficient to rehabilitate sagebrush steppe after wildfire.
Using data collected from 120 plots over three years (2011–2013) and 2012 National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery, we evaluated (1) whether well pads are more likely to be located in areas of pygmy rabbit habitat, (2) whether the presence and abundance of pygmy rabbits are related to distance from infrastructure, and, if so, (3) how much of the total surface area on a gas field is affected. Well pads on three gas fields occurred in higher quality pygmy rabbit habitat than did a set of randomly generated points, and the abundance and probability of pygmy rabbits being present were lower within approximately 0.5–1.5 km of the nearest road and 2 km of well pads and utilities. Buffering a digital layer of roads and well pads on one gas field revealed that nearly 82% of the (4417 km2) surface area was within 1 km of infrastructure, and over 95% of the gas field surface area was within 2 km. This need not be the case on future gas fields. Directional and horizontal well drilling technologies now make it possible for gas to be recovered from a greater area per well pad, enabling future gas field developments that require fewer well pads, roads, and pipeline corridors. Such changes would enable increased well pad spacing and provide the opportunity to locate gas field infrastructure in areas of poor quality wildlife habitat, avoid high priority habitat, and conserve a greater amount of on‐field wildlife habitat overall.
A resilience-based approach to management can facilitate regional planning by guiding the allocation of management resources to where they will have optimal socioecological benefits. This type of approach requires a sound understanding of the environmental factors, ecosystem attributes and processes, and landscape components that influence ecological resilience of the focal system. Chambers et al. review and integrate resilience concepts to help inform natural resources management decisions for ecosystems and landscapes. They describe the six key components of a resilience-based approach, beginning with managing for adaptive capacity and selecting an appropriate spatial extent and grain. Additional components include developing an understanding of the factors influencing the general and ecological resilience of ecosystems and landscapes, the landscape context and spatial resilience, pattern and process interactions and their variability, and relationships among ecological and spatial resilience and the capacity to support habitats and species. They suggest that a spatially explicit approach that couples geospatial information on general and spatial resilience to disturbance with information on resources, habitats, or species provides the foundation for resilience-based management. A case study from the sagebrush biome is provided that is widely used by the management agencies.
Improving decision processes and the informational basis upon which decisions are made in pursuit of safer and more effective fire response have become key priorities of the fire research community. One area of emphasis is bridging the gap between fire researchers and managers through development of application-focused, operationally relevant decision support tools. In this paper we focus on a family of such tools designed to characterise the difficulty of suppression operations by weighing suppression challenges against suppression opportunities. These tools integrate potential fire behaviour, vegetation cover types, topography, road and trail networks, existing fuel breaks and fireline production potential to map the operational effort necessary for fire suppression. We include case studies from two large fires in the USA and Spain to demonstrate model updates and improvements intended to better capture extreme fire behaviour and present results demonstrating successful fire containment where suppression difficulty index (SDI) values were low and containment only after a moderation of fire weather where SDI values were high. A basic aim of this work is reducing the uncertainty and increasing the efficiency of suppression operations through assessment of landscape conditions and incorporation of expert knowledge into planning.
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The toolkit is comprised of three elements:
- A roadmap for invasive grass management in the West, with new best management practices for the identification, protection, and expansion of “core” areas – regions with relatively low, or no, annual grass invasion;
- Case studies highlighting the application of these practices in Idaho and Wyoming; and
- A new geospatial data layer (which uses analytical tools to compile existing federal data) to help state and local managers assess invasive annual grasses within their jurisdictions, while also offering opportunities to identify new cross-boundary collaborative projects.