Fact Sheet / Brief
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In this work, researchers examined understory plant community responses to ecological restoration treatments at two pinyon-juniper woodland sites in northwestern Arizona. We asked the following questions: 1) do restoration treatments, that include tree thinning prescriptions guided by reference conditions, scattering thinning slash, and seeding, lead to increases in plant cover and species richness; and 2) how do understory responses differ across sites with contrasting soils characteristics?
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The bulletin highlights landscape exposure to multiple stressors can pose risks to human health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Attempts to study, control, or mitigate these stressors can strain public and private budgets. An interdisciplinary team of Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon State University scientists created maps of the conterminous United States that indicate landscape exposure to concentrated wildfire potential, insects and disease risk, urban and exurban development (note this is housing development only, not energy development), and climate change. The maps, which show where these stressors might occur and overlap, provide a valuable resource for regional and national land use, land management, and policymaking efforts by helping to guide resource prioritization.
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Recognizing the importance of mesic habitats in the desert, the NRCS-led Sage Grouse Initiative announces a new conservation strategy that empowers private ranchers and our partners to protect and enhance the wet, green places that sustain working lands and wildlife.
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This study was designed to quantify how the properties (size, shape, and fuel chemistry) of masticated fuels change with age and how these changes affect their burn characteristics (flame height, rate of spread, heat flux, and below fuel bed temperatures).
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This brief summarizes data and studies to determine whether the results of JFSP-funded projects are reaching potential users and informing management decisions and actions. Those studies have helped identify issues and influence changes within the program. While some studies showed that JFSP-funded research is being used for planning and for supporting treatment prescriptions, they also identified barriers that prevent greater use of fire science information by the broader fire management community. These outcomes studies are an important tool to help the JFSP address those barriers and continue to make program improvements.
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This bulletin summarizes recent research on biological soil crusts, which are a complex of microscopic organisms growing on the soil surface in many arid and semi-arid ecosystems. These crusts perform the important role of stabilizing soil and reducing or eliminating water and wind erosion. One of the largest threats to biological soil crusts in the arid and semi-arid areas of the western United States is mechanical disturbance from vehicle traffic and grazing. The spread of the annual invasive cheatgrass has increased the fuel load in areas that previously would not carry a fire, posing a potentially widespread and new threat to this resource.
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Based on nearly 25 years of experience at NASA, the University of Georgia, and The Weather Channel, Marshall Shepherd offers nine tips for communicating science to non-scientists.
- Know your audience
- Don’t use jargon
- Get to the point
- Use analogies and metaphors
- Give 3 key points
- You are the expert
- Use social media
- Take your message beyond the journals
- Relate to your audience
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Numerous agencies, organizations, and collaboratives conduct activities related to wildland fire. Understanding all of their different roles and objectives can be confusing. This fact sheet provides brief descriptions of some of the most common wildland fire initiatives, programs, networks, and other efforts taking place around the country.
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This brief was developed to help guide collaborative landscape planning efforts, through use of a framework of seven core principles and their implications for management of fire-prone interior forest landscapes.
Key findings included:
- Historically, forests were spatially heterogeneous at multiple scales as a result of interactions among succession, disturbance, and other processes.
- Planning and management are needed at fine to broad scales to restore the key characteristics of resilience.
- Landscapes must be viewed as socio-ecological systems that provide services to people within the limited capacities of ecosystems.
- Development of landscape-level prescriptions is the foundation of restoration planning.
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This research brief reports that applying salvaged biocrust material to severely disturbed soil rapidly reestablished favorable biocrust characteristics and stabilized soil more than doing nothing. This is likely a useful restoration strategy when unavoidable soil disturbances are planned and there are opportunities to salvage material.