Fact Sheet / Brief
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Study findings revealed that consistent treatment maintenance, the culture of communication about treatments, local expert knowledge, and unit/team composition are important components of how fuel treatments are evaluated and integrated during incident response.
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This “A-Z guide” highlights recent Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) science and covers methods to make biochar on site, including using piles, kilns, and air curtain burners. It also details three uses for biochar (agricultural, forest restoration, and mine land reclamation), and methods for application, including biochar spreaders.
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This paper argues that the expansion of prescribed fire will require new public policies that both protect burn practitioners from liability and compensate for losses from potential fire escapes.
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The Fireshed Registry is a geospatial dashboard for land managers and decision makers to view and map a vast array of data related to wildfire transmission, past, present, and future management, and past and predicted wildfires. The Registry covers the full continental U.S and includes 192 million hectares of forest land. Fireshed delineations within the tool are not limited by administrative, jurisdictional, or other anthropogenic boundaries.
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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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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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Wildfire can significantly alter the hydrologic response of a watershed to the extent that even modest rainstorms can produce dangerous flash floods and debris flows. The USGS conducts post-fire debris-flow hazard assessments for select fires in the Western U.S. We use geospatial data related to basin morphometry, burn severity, soil properties, and rainfall characteristics to estimate the probability and volume of debris flows that may occur in response to a design storm.
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Communities across the United States and the globe rely on clean water flowing from forested watersheds. But these water source areas are impacted by the effects of wildfire. To help water providers and land managers prepare for impacts from wildfire on water supplies, the U.S. Geological Survey is working to measure and predict post-fire water quality and quantity.
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Katherine Zeller, a research biologist with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute housed within the Rocky Mountain Research Station, was part of a team of researchers who created a series of species distribution models to determine whether this concern was warranted. “What we wanted to know is how these conifer treatments might affect a greater suite of species,” she explains. “Not just the sage grouse but these other species of conservation concern.”
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Lower treelines in the Intermountain West are often defined by the boundary beyond which conditions are too dry for trees. Scientists are observing tree mortality in response to global climate changes and associated increased aridity in some places. Land managers are keenly interested in these changing ecological dynamics and how forests will shift in response to climate change.