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Description: In the southwestern US humans and ecosystems share a history of fire. Here, contemporary ecological patterns and processes that are thought to be natural may be highly influenced by past human land use legacies, at millennial time scales. The Jemez Mountains of central New Mexico provide a landscape laboratory rich in archaeological, ethnographic, and ecological data sets, within which to study the reciprocal, long-term interactions of humans and fire. Evidence from tree-rings, fire scars, and charcoal sediments suggests that prior to the 20th century, southwestern pine forests sustained frequent, low-severity surface fires. During a period of dense occupation in the 13th and 14th centuries, land and resource use may have significantly influenced forest structure, fuel properties, ignitions, and landscape fire dynamics. We developed complex spatial models, informed by rich archaeological, ethnographic, and dendroarchaeological data sets, to examine how plausible scenarios of human activities influenced forests and fire regimes ca. 1200-1900 CE. We found that prehistoric populations influenced forest and fire patterns at broad spatial scales, with feedbacks that maintained ecological resilience. Our results highlight the complexity and extent of long-term human-environment interactions and can be used as a comparative framework within which to evaluate the significance of contemporary and predicted anthropogenic impacts on landscapes and ecosystems.
Presenter: Rachel Loehman is a landscape and fire ecologist with the US Geological Survey. Her research focuses on the role of natural and anthropogenic disturbances in shaping ecological patterns and processes. Her current research projects include developing strategies for enhancing ecosystem and forest resilience to changing climate and disturbance regimes (western U.S.) and monitoring and modeling fire impacts to archaeological resources (southwestern U.S.).
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Presenter: Sarah McCaffrey
Description: Fire management in the United States is currently facing numerous challenges. While many of these challenges involve questions about how to increase pace and scale of fuels treatments and adapt to longer, sometimes year-round, fire seasons and more frequent extreme fires, there is also a need to adapt wildfire communication efforts to changing fire management needs and practices. This presentation will discuss insights from two decades of fire social science research about a range of topics to consider in improving wildfire communication including issues with conflation of language (prevention is not mitigation), when more rather than less complex explanations may be merited, and the need to account for how fire fits in everyday lives. The presentation will draw from general Communication, Natural Hazards, and Risk Communication theory, as well as specific fire social science research findings, about topics and approaches that are more or less likely to resonate with the public.
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Over the past decade, government policies and programs to incentivize “all-lands approaches” to reducing wildfire risk have emerged that call for collective action among diverse public, private, and Tribal landowners who share fire-prone landscapes. This presentation draws on research from Oregon and California to offer insights into what collective action looks like, when it is desirable, and how to promote it to increase the resilience of fire-prone forests.
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Description: Effects of juniper encroachment and removal on multiple wildlife species in the Steens Mountains area and quantifying effects of grazing on sagebrush ecosystems and associated wildlife.
Presenter: Vanessa Schroeder is a faculty research assistant at Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center-Burns, which is in the heart of Oregons’s sagebrush country. She holds a master’s degree in Wildlife Science from OSU.
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Description: Agricultural seed production is needed to meet ambitious restoration goals, which will require more seeds than can be harvested from wild populations. However, there may be direct conflicts between traits that are favorable in conventional agriculture and those that are adaptive in restoration settings, which could have long-lasting impacts on restored communities. Here, we review some of these evolutionary and ecological conflicts and suggest research directions needed to meld the needs of agriculturalists and restoration practitioners. Partnerships between ecologists, engineers, breeders, and growers are essential to develop best practices for providing seeds for successful native species restoration.
Presenters:
Alison Agneray has ten years of experience executing long-range research and monitoring programs across the Western United States. She is currently a PhD candidate working with Dr. Beth Leger at the University of Nevada Reno to optimize seed mixes used to restore degraded habitats in North America’s Great Basin Desert.
Owen Baughman is a Restoration Scientist with The Nature Conservancy of Oregon, USA, and has worked to understand, test, and/or demonstrate new and innovative approaches to native plant restoration in North America’s sagebrush steppe. He earned an MS in Plant Ecology in 2014 from the University of Nevada Reno, and a BS in Ecology and Conservation Biology in 2010 from the University of Idaho.
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Presented by: Travis Warziniack
Though National Forests are required to address ecosystem services and human benefits in planning and management decisions, most have limited capacity to meet those requirements. New tools are helping forests more easily identify impacts to ecosystem services and communicate their role in providing benefits to stakeholders. Moving toward nationally consistent methods will allow forests to more easily assess their ecosystem services, with the flexibility of adding local knowledge when needed.
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Presented by: Dan Neary
Wildfires can produce significant hydrological and ecological impacts on forest, woodland, and grassland ecosystems depending on fire size, severity, duration, timing, fuel loads, and weather conditions. In the past several decades, wildfire conditions have changed from previous ones in the 20th Century. Wildfires are now burning larger areas in hotter, windier, and drier weather. In addition, the timeframe for these fires has expanded by four months in some regions to 12 months in fire-prone states like California. These large fires, known as megafires (greater than 40,000 acres) are burning more wildland areas every year. Some reach the giga-fire classification (405,000+ acres) with increasing frequency. These trends are contributing to increased desertification of forest lands. This presentation examines the role of these large fires in producing desertification of wildland ecosystems.
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Presented by: Sean Healey and Zhiqiang Yang
Forest managers increasingly require statistically grounded estimates of forest carbon storage at the resolution of individual ownerships (a few thousand acres). Carbon offset markets and general recognition of climate change mitigation as an ecosystem service provide incentive for monitoring carbon, but stand exams are costly, and varying methods may reduce comparability across ownerships. NASA’s GEDI mission provides high-quality lidar data across the country, and the Forest Service’s OBIWAN tool (Online Biomass Inference using Waveforms and iNventory) allows owners to generate and document GEDI-based estimates of mean carbon storage for their own land.
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Presented by: Matt Reeves
Estimating the number of animals that can be sustainably supported depends on numerous factors such as forage quantities, terrain, distance from water, and the type of vegetation being considered. Historically most approaches to conducting capacity estimates were limited by a paucity of spatially explicit data describing these factors. However, recent advances in remotely sensed data products and modelling ideas have improved our ability to refine these estimates and do it consistently across all lands which has significant implications for future land management plans such as Allotment Management Plans and Annual Operating Instructions (AOI) for federally managed grazing allotments. In this presentation we demonstrate application of our modernized modelling approach and present results of our recent assessment of wild horse and burro capacity in California.