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This review revealed tradeoffs in woody fuel treatments between reducing canopy fuels vs. increasing understory herbaceous vegetation (fuels) and fire behavior. In pinyon-juniper expansion areas, all treatments decreased crown fire risk. Prescribed fire and cut and broadcast burn treatments reduced woody fuels long-term but had higher risk of invasion. Mechanical treatments left understory vegetation intact and increased native perennial plants. However, cut and leave treatments increased downed woody fuel and high-intensity wildfire risk, while cut and pile burn and mastication caused localized disturbances and annual grass invasion. Ecological outcomes depended on ecological resilience; sites with warm and dry conditions or depleted perennial native herbaceous species experienced lower recovery and resistance to invasive annual grasses. In invasive annual grass dominated areas, high-intensity targeted grazing reduced fine fuels but required retreatment or seeding; in intact ecosystems with relatively low shrub cover, dormant season targeted grazing reduced fine fuel and thus fire spread. Preemergent herbicides reduced annual grasses with differing effects in warm and dry vs. cool and moist environments.
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While increased length and intensity of wildfire seasons in many places have led to more concern about wildland firefighter safety, we believe ethnography has been underutilized as a method within this domain. In response, we begin building a shared idiom for ethnographic engagement with wildland firefighter safety and similar occupations. We draw on ethnographic approaches to late industrialism to develop a method called discursive risk analysis (DRA) as an initial stage in a broader collaborative and generative research practice. By collaborative, we mean cooperation among stakeholder, disciplinary, professional, and other groups. We use DRA to analyze ethnographic data and documentary sources relevant to discussions of ‘the Big Lie’ among firefighters and agency leadership. The Big Lie is a term that both firefighters and agency leaders used to suggest that wildland firefighters are being harmed by agency discourse that says firefighters will be kept safe despite the unavoidable danger of the job. It is important to the Big Lie discussion that this harm is conceptualized by firefighters as discursively driven, necessitating a research method attentive to discourse. Discursive Risk Analysis of the Big Lie discussion suggests two discursive gaps that may result in two discursive risks. The first gap, found in agency discourse, is that ‘everyone knows the job is dangerous’ but ‘zero fatalities is a reasonable goal.’ This gap is associated with a discursive risk, a possible decrease in trust among wildland firefighters in agency leadership. The second gap, observed in firefighter discourse, is that ‘the job is dangerous’ but ‘no one will get hurt today.’ This gap is associated with another discursive risk, the possibility of decreased situational awareness. Finally, we clarify each of these gaps and risks through two anthropological concepts (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and the public secret) that can bring new perspectives to discussions about institutional cultures of health and safety.
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In this Live Science article, Francis Kilkenny, lead of Great Basin Native Plant Project (GBNPP), shares information about the GBNPP and how it continues to support more successful rangeland restoration.
Lessons learned, so far include:
- Climate is more important than geography when predicting how well seeds will grow and establish themselves. Seeds don’t care where their parents lived if the temperature suits them and if they get the right amount of sunshine and precipitation.
- Timing of seed planting makes a big difference. Year to year, even week to week, variation in weather patterns can affect the restoration success of a burned site.
- Method of planting matters. To achieve the best results, scientists recommend tamping seeds into the ground to ensure they have good contact with the soil, or in some cases, planting a species in the form of “plugs.”
- Long-term monitoring after planting is critical to determine the effectiveness of different seed mixes and restoration techniques.
- Keeping livestock off seeded rangeland for at least three years improves a restoration effort’s likelihood of success.
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We found that there were large proportions of non-significant responses among all categories combined, with roughly half or more of all responses non-significant (48 percent for wildlife, 60 percent for vegetation-environmental), comparable to other recent systematic reviews of pinyon-juniper treatment effects. However, we also found that when there were significant responses, some important trends potentially emerged. Important undesirable outcomes included far more positive than negative responses of exotic grass and forb abundance among nearly all treatment types. Cutting treatments were also more likely to decrease biocrust cover and microbial activity. Potentially beneficial outcomes included mostly positive responses among sagebrush obligate species, including more positive than negative responses for mule deer and sage-grouse. Some treatment types (for example, mastication) also resulted in more positive than negative responses for native grasses and forbs (although, non-significant responses were the majority). We also highlighted many limitations of this review, including how responses often come from few studies, and how some response-treatment category combinations lack adequate response data. Moreover, the existing research is often insufficient to address many key questions about treatment effects, largely owing to short time-scales and limited spatial extents of observations, which do not match the size of treatments being implemented by land managers, nor capture long-term, post-treatment ecological dynamics. We also identify a lack of research that addresses key interactions that could undermine restoration objectives, including potential effects of climate change and grazing on post-treatment environments. Thus, we emphasize the importance of integrating these factors into future pinyon-juniper treatment research, and we stress the need for use of monitoring programs and research studies that partake in data collection and analysis over long durations and broad spatial scales.
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Making lands resilient to climate change has become a legal mandate for US Forest Service land planners (2012 USFS Planning Rule). However, interpreting and applying the directive is challenging because the term “resilience” is rather vague. It is diluted by a variety of definitions in the literature, as well as executed differently in diverse ecosystems by a variety of specialists.
To better grasp how USFS staff interpreted and applied the directive, twenty-six Southwestern Region USFS planners and mangers were interviewed for 30-60 minutes each. The semi-structured interviews were then coded to identify themes and trends. Overall, inductive content analysis of the coded interview data showed that the interviewees had three main areas of concern over the difficulty in reporting and implementing the resilience directive: 1) definitions and scale, 2) flexibility and specificity, and 3) the resilience to climate change paradox.
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This webinar was originally presented August 29, 2018 11am AZ/12pm MDT by Kimiko Barrett of Headwaters Economics.
As wildfires increase in size and severity, the costs to protect homes and lives similarly rise. Yet protecting communities represents a relatively small portion of the total costs of a wildfire—other short- and long-term impacts yield a variety of costs that often go unrecognized. In an analysis of five case studies—the Hayman (2002), Old, Grand Prix, and Padua Complex (2003), Schultz (2010), Rim (2013), and Loma fires (2016)—suppression costs averaged nine percent of total wildfire costs; additional short-term expenses and long-term damages accounted for 91 percent of total wildfire costs. Nearly half of all wildfire costs are paid at the local level by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and homeowners. The remaining wildfire costs are paid at the state and federal level, or are paid by a combination of local, state, and federal organizations. Overall, short-term expenses such as suppression, relief aid, evacuation services, and home and property loss comprise around 35 percent of total wildfire costs. Long-term damages, which can take years to fully manifest, account for approximately 65 percent of total wildfire costs. Although wildfire costs greatly vary depending on factors within the built and unbuilt environment, increasing trends in climate change and development patterns favoring high-wildfire-risk areas suggest a parallel rise in total wildfire costs. Planning new communities and developments with consideration of wildfire risk is one way to accommodate growth while living alongside wildfires.
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.
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.).
Workshop recordings.
The aim of this workshop is to better understand how NASA and community expertise can be leveraged in the development of systems that monitor, assess, mitigate, and assure safety concerns of dynamic operations in challenging work environments. The primary goals are to:
- Identify and prioritize top safety-oriented risks, gaps in capabilities, and emerging technologies to enhance wildland firefighting for both near-term and mid-term operational concepts
- Engage the stakeholder community in defining emergent safety-oriented roles, responsibilities, and procedures for agents undergoing increasingly complex wildland firefighting operations in information-rich but uncertain environments
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Data, weather, and tools to provide timely and site-specific information about long-term patterns of weather and microsite variability for rangeland restoration planning and management.