Synthesis / Tech Report
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This Rangelands on the Edge (ROTE) project improves our understanding of the fate of rangelands from historical, present day, and future perspectives by describing human modification, fragmentation, and future residential growth projections for rangeland-dominated vegetation. Since pre-European settlement, some 340 million acres (over 34 percent) of rangelands, particularly in the Great Plains, have been converted to alternative land uses, especially intensive agriculture (croplands, pastureland). Approximately 11 percent of private rangelands are likely to experience significant increases in housing development over the next 15 years.
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This report presents a new fuel sampling method, called the photoload sampling technique, to quickly and accurately estimate loadings for six common surface fuel components (1 hr, 10 hr, 100 hr, and 1000 hr downed dead woody, shrub, and herbaceous fuels). This technique involves visually comparing fuel conditions in the field with photoload sequences to estimate fuel loadings. Photoload sequences are a series of downward-looking and close-up oblique photographs depicting a sequence of graduated fuel loadings of synthetic fuelbeds for each of the six fuel components.
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The original objective of the study was to determine how ignition, smoldering, and flaming are affected by the age of masticated fuels using a combined field and lab approach.
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Almost half of the full community costs of wildfire are paid for at the local level, including homeowners, businesses, and government agencies. Many of these costs are due to long-term damages to community and environmental services, such as landscape rehabilitation, lost business and tax revenues, and property and infrastructure repairs. By comparison, our analysis suggests suppression costs comprise around nine percent of total wildfire costs. The remaining costs include short-term expenses, or those costs occurring within the first six months—and long-term damages accruing during many months and years following a wildfire. Communities at risk to wildfires can reduce wildfire impacts and associated costs through land use planning.
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This report is an outstanding complete description of not only the Rothermel model, but also the modifications and addendums that have evolved for supporting the many systems that use the model. This work shows all the equations, discusses their relevance, and illustrates graphically their response to changes in their inherent variables. The variables required for driving the models referred to as inputs, which must be obtained to describe the environment in which the fire is burning, are often misunderstood.
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This study found that area burned during the 30-year period, number of fires each year, and fire size followed a strong geographic pattern: Northern Intermountain > Southern Intermountain > Southern Rocky Mountain > Central Rocky Mountain. Area burned within piñon and juniper land cover types increased significantly during the 30-year period across the study area overall and for each geographic region, except the Southern Intermountain. Fire rotations were within reported historical ranges for sagebrush ecosystems and decreased over time. Also, fire number or fire size increased for the Southern Rocky Mountain and Southern Intermountain geographic regions. Across the study area, spatio-temporal patterns in fire regimes for piñon and juniper land cover types were similar to those for other land cover types. Careful monitoring of longer term trends in fire activity and the interacting effects of invasive annual grasses, bark beetles, and climate change is needed to access the dynamics of piñon and juniper land cover types and evaluate the efficacy of management treatments in piñon and juniper land cover types.
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This Gap Report Update is the latest addition to the list of valuable products of the Working Group designed to help identify the challenges (gaps) and offer ideas to address those challenges. The Gap Report Update has something for every level, public and private, to consider helping address the fire and invasive threat. It is our hope that the leaders of the various state and federal agencies will review the recommendations in the report and determine if there are things they can affect directly to address the gaps. It took a multi-agency, multi-discipline Working Group to identify the problems and provide possible solutions to these conservation and management challenges, it will certainly take a broad-based coalition of agencies, and public and private groups working together to ensure a healthy Sagebrush Biome is available for generations to come.
This project and it’s associated resources, can be accessed here.
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The objectives of this study, were: 1) use of climate projections to predict changes in fire activity in 2050, 2) identify potential changes in vegetation and fuels resulting from changes in climate and their implications in fire activity, 3) identify changes in fire occurrence and severity resulting from changes in future climate and vegetation and fuels, and 4) predict impacts on air quality resulting from changes in fire activity and climate on the mid-21st century.
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The importance of cost effective fuel treatment programs has appeared consistently in federal directives (FLAME ACT, National Cohesive Strategy, U.S Department of Interior Office of Policy Analysis) as a priority. Implementing cost effective fuel treatment programs requires a spatially explicit and integrated systematic approach that can be applied to the landscape, program and national scale. The objectives of this study were three-fold. The first objective was to generate cost effective fuel treatment programs at the landscape scale and their impact on the preparedness program. The second objective was to quantify the interrelationship between the fuel program and preparedness program by budget alternative at a landscape scale to provide mangers with the fuel and preparedness budgets that achieve the highest return on investment for any combination of budgets. The third objective was to form cost effective national and regional fuel treatment programs based on the data collected from the landscape analysis that considers national and regional policies.