Webinar
Webinar recording.
LANDFIRE is one of several programs that tracks treatment events on the landscape. Join TNC Fire Ecologist, Kori Blankenship as she discusses the importance of knowing when and where these treatments occur – having this knowledge available allows land managers to track progress towards land management objectives. Kori provides a brief summary of treatment tracking events and their effort to demonstrates how The Nature Conservancy is using LANDFIRE’s Events data to assess the extent of treatments in dry forests in the 11 western states.
Workshop resources, recordings.
Invasive annual grasses (IAG) – including cheatgrass, medusahead, ventanata, and others – continue to be a primary cause of rangeland degradation in the western US. In this workshop, we build upon concepts presented in previous events (see https://www.invasivegrasses.com/virtual-workshop) and focus specifically on turning strategies into action for managing IAG. Not only will we learn about the most current science around managing IAG, we will also hear success stories from ongoing projects and partnerships around the West.
You asked for it, you get it! A major component of this year’s virtual workshop will focus on answering questions submitted by you, the participants. We have compiled a list of questions submitted by previous workshop participants and will combine them with questions you can submit when you register to provide specific responses to those questions. Together, we will explore uniting landscape-scale strategic conservation concepts with targeted, on-the-ground management techniques specifically designed to meet vegetation management goals.
The US Geological Survey Land Management Research Program and the Great Basin Fire Science Exchange teamed up to bring you updates in sagebrush, fire, and wildlife related research.
Dates, Topics, and Presentations:
1/30 – Sage-grouse, carbon topics
Webinar recording
Summary webpage
Program with speakers, talks, and resources
- Greater sage-grouse hierarchical population monitoring framework: Range-wide application of an early warning systems for populations at-risk – Coates, Weise et al.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of conservation actions directed for greater sage-grouse using hierarchical models and the Conservation Efforts Database – Coates et al.
- Greater sage-grouse range-wide seasonal habitat maps: Identifying regional thresholds and relationships between trends and seasonal habitat use – Wann et al.
- Characterizing the environmental drivers of range-wide gene flow for greater sage-grouse – Zimmerman et al.
- Characterizing greater sage-grouse climate driven maladaptation – Zimmerman et al.
- Quantifying carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions in sagebrush rangelands to inform management for carbon resilience – Bagcilar et al.
2/6 – Invasive species, restoration effectiveness, and monitoring
Webinar recording
Summary webpage
Program with speakers, talks, and resources
- Develop annual herbaceous percent cover maps in near-real time – Boyte et al.
- Proliferation of fine fuels: Assessing under future climatic conditions – Roche et al.
- Optimizing sagebrush restoration and management actions to increase connectivity within the Sagebrush Conservation Design – Tarbox et al.
- Assessing cheatgrass treatment efficacy across the sagebrush biome – Tarbox et al.
- Simulating trends in land health components under treatment scenarios and Sagebrush Conservation Design – Christensen et al.
- Biome-wide vegetation change monitoring and warning system – Aldridge et al.
- Vectors of annual grass invasion – Roche et al.
- Predicting reburn risk to restoration investments – Applestein et al.
2/20 – Monitoring, pinyon-juniper, and fuels management
Webinar recording
Summary webpage
Program with speakers, talks, and resources
- Planning for conservation delivery success: Linking biome-wide Sagebrush Conservation Design to local treatment planning by leveraging landscape restoration outcomes- Arkle et al.
- Technical transfer tools for the Nevada and Oregon rangeland monitoring project (NORMP) – Pilliod et al.
- Rapid and Other Assessment and Monitoring Methods (ROAM) project – Jeffries et al.
- Pinyon-juniper treatments for minimizing climate and fire vulnerability – Noel et al.
- Synthesis and forecasts of pinyon-juniper woodland die-off – Wion (No recording)
- Synthesizing scientific information on treatment and natural disturbance effects on pinyon-juniper woodlands and associated wildlife habitat – Halperin et al.
2/27 – Fire, fuels management, invasive species –
Webinar recording
Summary webpage
Program with speakers, talks, and resources
- Effectiveness of layering treatments in the “multiple-intervention” response to wildfire in sagebrush steppe – Germino et al.
- A collaborative and iterative framework for delivering applied fuel break science: With a focus on sagebrush ecosystems and the Great Basin – Shinneman et al.
- UAS survey of sagebrush fuel breaks – Shinneman et al.
- Invasive annual grass – Economic assessment – Orning et al.
- Longevity of herbicides targeting exotic annual grasses in sagebrush-steppe soils – Germino et al.
- Synthesis of indaziflam outcomes for protecting sagebrush ecosystems – Roche et al.
- Can ruderal components of biocrust be maintained under increasing threats of drought, grazing, and wild horses? Condon et al.
3/6 – Climate, vegetation trends, and big game
Webinar recording
Summary webpage
Program with speakers, talks, and resources
- Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection (RCMAP) vegetation trend summaries – Rigge
- Integrating climate, sagebrush ecological integrity, and grazing – Holdrege et al.
- Influence of future climate scenarios on habitat and population dynamics of greater sage-grouse – O’Neil et al.
- Understanding and forecasting environmental controls over plant establishment in sagebrush ecosystems to enhance restoration success – Siegmund, Stears et al.
- Treatment and post-fire assessment tools for management of the sagebrush ecosystem – Duniway, Tyree et al.
- Science to support elk management efforts to reduce CWD risk – Janousek et al.
Webinar recording.
Speaker: Connor Crouch, Forester, USDA Forest Service, Mark Twain National Forest.
Description: In this webinar from the Forest Stewards Guild and Southwest Fire Science Consortium, attendees will hear about insights from the recent paper. The speaker will highlight the threat to aspen ecosystems posed by climate change, chronic ungulate browse, and outbreaks of the invasive insect oystershell scale. He will make the case for three aspen management objectives to address these threats and increase aspen resilience and adaptive capacity: (1) promote diversity in age structure by enhancing regeneration and recruitment, (2) mitigate impacts of ungulate browse on recruitment, and (3) enhance structural, adaptive, and functional complexity. The webinar will detail how various management strategies could meet these objectives.
Webinar recording.
Presenter: John Abatzoglou, University of California, Merced
Description: Red flag warnings (RFWs) are issued to alert management and emergency response agencies of weather conditions that are conducive to extreme wildfire behavior. Issuance of RFWs also can encourage the public to exercise extreme caution with activities that could ignite a wildfire. Among the ignition causes associated with human activity, some generally reflect short-term behavioral decisions, whereas others are linked to infrastructure and habitual behaviors. From 2006–2020, approximately 8% of wildfires across the western United States were discovered on days with RFWs. We discuss our discovery that although the number of human-caused fires was higher on RFW days than on similar days without RFWs, the warnings appeared to disproportionately reduce the number of ignitions associated with short-term behavioral choices.
Webinar recording.
Presenters: Mojtaba Sadegh, Boise State University; Karen Short, USDA Forest Service
Description: Understanding of the conditions that contribute to wildfire ignitions and impacts increases capacity to mitigate wildfire risks. The Fire Program Analysis Fire-Occurrence Database (FPA FOD) contains information on the location, jurisdiction, discovery time, cause, and final size of more than 2 million wildfires from 1992 through 2020. To each of those wildfire records, we added information on 267 physical, biological, social, and administrative attributes. As we will demonstrate, these publicly available data can be used to answer numerous questions about the circumstances associated with human- and lightning-caused wildfires. We will share examples of how the enhanced FPA FOD data can support descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive wildfire analytics, including the development of machine learning models.
Webinar recording.
Fire suppression is the primary management response to wildfires in many areas globally. By removing less-extreme wildfires, this approach ensures that remaining wildfires burn under more extreme conditions. This is termed the “suppression bias”, and it fundamentally impacts wildfire activity, independent of fuel accumulation and climate change. Attempting to suppress all wildfires necessarily means that fires will burn with more severe and less diverse ecological impacts, with burned area increasing at faster rates than expected from fuel accumulation or climate change. Over a human lifespan, the modeled impacts of the suppression bias exceed those from fuel accumulation or climate change alone, suggesting that suppression may exert a significant and underappreciated influence on patterns of fire globally. Managing wildfires to safely burn under low and moderate conditions is thus a critical tool to address the growing wildfire crisis. Presented by Mark Kreider, TNC
Webinar recording.
The use of prescribed fire to manage ecosystems is increasing across the United States, but climate change threatens to impact future opportunities for prescribed fire as a result of changes in meteorological conditions and fuels. I will discuss the results of a recent study which combined prescription information from 80 sites across the US with LANDFIRE fuels data and downscaled future climate projections to evaluate how climate change will impact future availability of burn days. Our results indicate that rising maximum temperatures may lead to decreases in burn days across the eastern US, while rising minimum temperatures and decreasing wind speeds may lead to increased opportunities for prescribed fire in the northern and northwestern US.
Webinar recording.
Wildland fire managers require an expanded toolbox for decision support in the context of an increasingly novel fuel and fire environment complicated by a changing climate, invasive species encroachment, and rapid increase in wildland-urban interface in many areas within the U.S. Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) offers an efficient, cost-effective, and powerful tool for characterizing high resolution, sub-canopy forest and fuel structural conditions with the simple press of a button. In this panel discussion, TLS subject matter experts from both research and operations will share their efforts and practical applications of TLS and other 3D wildland fuels characterization tools for improved wildland fire planning, fire effects monitoring, and decision support.
Webinar recording.
The California Canyon Fire Experiment is the first large-scale field experiment that observed fire eruption. The experiment was conducted in a steep canyon near Salinas, CA on 24 October 2022. A large suite of in situ and remote sensing instruments were deployed including micrometeorological towers, Doppler radar and lidar and airborne infrared imaging systems. The experiment was designed to allow a head fire to spread freely up a canyon under weak ambient winds to investigate the mechanisms of fire eruption. Preliminary results indicate that fire eruption occurred after the fire front reached the upper region of the canyon and fire spread was dominated by fire-induced in-drafts measured by Doppler lidar. This presentation will describe the goals of the experiment, experimental design, the phenomena sampled, the instruments used, and preliminary results.