Synthesis / Tech Report
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This project quantifies the effects of fuel treatments and previously burned areas on daily fire management costs, as well as summarizes recent encounter rates between fuel treatments and
wildland fires across the conterminous United States. Unexpectedly, we found that encounters with fuel treatments and previous fires increase daily fire management costs. Managers working in the field validated the concept suggesting that fuel treatments and previous fires are often areas where suppression efforts are applied in greater force.
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Findings of this research suggest that a hedge betting approach (employing more than one restoration method) can increase the probability of successful restoration. Broadcast seeding seed pillows and bare seed over two years resulted in a sagebrush restoration success rate of 86% compared to 36% if only one method was used in one year. Information generated from this study will help land managers successfully restore sage-grouse habitat after wildfires by pairing restoration methods with site characteristics.
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Since the 1990s, numerous Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPAs) have emerged in Oregon and Idaho, and a recent 2015 law authorizes RFPAs in Nevada as well. RFPAs organize and authorize rancher participation in fire suppression alongside federal agency firefighters (typically, the Bureau of Land Management or BLM). These all-volunteer crews of ranchers have training and legal authority to respond to fires on private and state lands in landscapes where there had been no existing fire protection, and can become authorized to respond on federal lands as well.
There has been growing policy interest in better understanding the RFPA model. This study analyzed RFPA establishment, functioning, successes, and challenges through four case studies of individual RFPAs and their respective state programs in Oregon and Idaho during 2015-2016.
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The fire characteristics chart is a graphical method of presenting U.S. National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indexes and components as well as primary surface or crown fire behavior characteristics. Computer software has been developed to produce fire characteristics charts for both fire danger and fire behavior in a format suitable for inclusion in reports and presentations. Scales, colors, labels, and legends can be modified as needed. The fire characteristics chart for fire behavior has been described previously (Andrews et al. 2011). This report describes the fire characteristics chart for fire danger, which displays the relationships among the Spread Component, Energy Release Component, and Burning Index by plotting the three values as a single point. Indices calculated by using FireFamilyPlus can be imported into the fire danger characteristics chart software. Example applications of this software for comparing fire seasons, weather stations, and fire danger rating fuel models are presented.
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Fuel treatments decreased intrinsic water use efficiency relative to the control in Arizona although the differences were not sufficiently large to reach the threshold of statistical significance. Very dry conditions characterized post-treatment climate in Arizona and treatment decreased competition among trees for water. Decreased competition appears to have led to higher stomatal conductance in surviving trees and thus lower intrinsic water use efficiency, even with post-treatment growth increases as measured by basal area index. The treatment response supports our hypothesis of the expected treatment response.
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This study showed higher levels of resilience to fire than is typically discussed in the sagebrush steppe, in part because the studied ecosystems were in good condition before the fire, but also because the longer post-fire monitoring time (17 years) may be more appropriate to capture patterns of succession in these ecosystems.
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The goals of the National Forest and Rangeland Management Initiative are to:
- Examine existing forest and rangeland management authorities and programs to determine their strengths and weaknesses;
- Perform a detailed investigation of the role of collaboratives in landscape restoration;
- Create a mechanism for states and land managers to share best practices, case studies and policy options for forest and rangeland management; and
- Recommend improved forest and rangeland management authorities and encourage more effective collaboration.
This report outlines the launch year of the Initiative and includes both administrative and legislative recommendations.
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In this report, guidelines are presented for restoring whitebark pine under future climates using the rangewide restoration strategy structure. The information to create the guidelines came from two sources: (1) a comprehensive review of the literature and (2) a modeling experiment that simulated various climate change, management, and fire exclusion scenarios. The general guidelines presented here are to be used with the rangewide strategy to address climate change impacts for planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating fine-scale restoration activities for whitebark pine by public land management agencies.
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This study found that:
- Few changes in most of the measured masticated fuel bed properties were detected over the 10 years represented in the sample. This indicates that in dry environments, it may take at least 10 years for ecological processes to change fuel characteristics enough for adverse fire effects to be mitigated.
- Burning masticated fuel beds in a laboratory revealed that there is a great deal of heat that is pulsed into the soil that could cause major mortality to belowground systems. This is especially true in high loading fuel beds with duff layers present.
- All masticated fuel beds dried to equilibrium in less than seven days, indication that these quickly drying fuels can be readily susceptible to smoldering combustion after 5-7 days of drying.
- Existing fuel models (including 11, SB1, SB2 and two existing custom fuel models) were good at representing fire behavior, indicating that there is no need to develop new, custom fuel models for masticated fuel beds.
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This report identified leks and larger scale populations in immediate need of management, based on the occurrence of two criteria: (1) crossing of a destabilizing threshold designed to identify significant rates of population decline at a particular nested scale; and (2) crossing of decoupling thresholds designed to identify rates of population decline at smaller scales that decouple from rates of population change at a larger spatial scale. This approach establishes how declines affected by local disturbances can be separated from those operating at larger scales (for example, broad-scale wildfire and region-wide drought). Given the threshold output from our analysis, this adaptive management framework can be implemented readily and annually to facilitate responsive and effective actions for sage-grouse populations in the Great Basin. The rules of the framework can also be modified to identify populations responding positively to management action or demonstrating strong resilience to disturbance. Similar hierarchical approaches might be beneficial for other species occupying landscapes with heterogeneous disturbance and climatic regimes.