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Abstracts of Recent Papers on Range Management in the West. Prepared by Charlie Clements, Rangeland Scientist, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Reno, NV
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This brief shares information about the Citadel fire incident and lessons learned by and from the Great Basin Smokejumpers.
Webinar recording.
Description:
- Articulate successful applications of Good Neighbor Authority for tribes, counties, and states;
- Provide examples of when tools like Good Neighbor Authority are unlikely to be successful;
- Discuss how to use tools from the Tribal Forest Protection Act;
- Discuss how to use tools from the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; and
- Discuss how to use Stewardship Contracting.
Presenters:
- Rob Farrell, Virginia State Forester;
- Jim Durglo, Intertribal Timber Council Wildland Fire Technical Specialist;
- Lynn Sholty, USDA Forest Service Grants and Agreements Specialist; and
- Nils Christoffersen, Wallowa Resources Executive Director.
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This paper highlights greater sage-grouse egg depredation observations obtained opportunistically from three common raven nests located in Idaho and Nevada where depredated greater sage-grouse eggs were found at or in the immediate vicinity of the nest site, including the caching of eggs in nearby rock crevices. Nests were opportunistically monitored by counting and removing depredated eggs and shell fragments from the nest sites during each visit to determine the extent to which the common raven pairs preyed on greater sage-grouse eggs. These observations may represent the first evidence that breeding, territorial pairs of common ravens cache greater sage-grouse eggs and are capable of depredating multiple greater sage-grouse nests.
Webinar recording.
A conversation with Bea Day, Incident Commander, USDA Forest Service, Sara Sweeney, Superintendent, Mormon Lake Hotshots, USDA Forest Service and Stuart (Stu) Rodeffer, Logistics Section Chief, Portland NIMO Team, USDA Forest Service
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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 Science article reports on a growing body of research challenging the widespread notion that beetle-killed forests are more vulnerable to more severe fires than those that have escaped infestation. The findings are highlighting the complex causes of western wildfires and raising new questions about the efficacy of some fire prevention policies, such as plans to remove beetle-killed trees from vast swaths of forest.
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This brief summarizes fire ecology and management issues in California mixed-conifer forests for an audience without a background in fire, including the general public and media.
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Across all cases, actors spanned boundaries to perform functions including: (1) convening meetings and agreements; (2) implementing projects; (3) community outreach; (4) funding support; (5) project planning; (6) scientific expertise. These functions fostered conducive boundary settings, concepts and objects to communicate and work across boundaries, navigating challenges to implementing work on the ground. This work highlights context-specific ways to advance cross-boundary wildfire risk reduction efforts and uses a boundary spanning lens to illustrate how collective action in wildfire management evolves in different settings. This research highlights prescribed fire as a gateway for future collective action on wildfire risk, including managing naturally ignited wildfires for resource benefits and improving coordination during wildfire suppression efforts.
Webinar recording.
Over the last 30 years, in woodland and forested ecosystems across the southwestern US, there has been an increasing trend in fire activity. Altered land use practices and more recent changes in precipitation patterns and warmer temperatures are widely thought to contribute to departures in fire regimes toward more frequent and larger fires with more extreme fire behavior that threatens the persistence of the various forested ecosystems. We examined climate-fire relationships in these vegetation types in Arizona and New Mexico using an expanded satellite-derived burn severity dataset that incorporates over one million additional burned hectares analyzed as extended assessments to the MTBS project’s data and five climate variables from PRISM. Climate-fire relationships were identified by comparing annual total area burned, area burned at high/low severity, and percent high severity regionally with fire season (May-August) and water year (October-September) temperature, precipitation, and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) variables. The high severity indicators were also derived for each fire individually to see if climate-fire relationships persist at the scale of the individual fire. Increasing trends toward more arid conditions were observed in all but two of the climate variables. Furthermore, VPD-fire correlations were consistently as strong or more correlated compared to temperature or precipitation indicators alone, both regionally and at the scale of the individual fire. Thus, our results support the use of VPD as a more comprehensive climate metric than temperature or other water-balance measures to predict future fire activity. Managers will have to face the implications of increasing high severity fire as trends in climate toward warmer and drier conditions become an increasingly dominant factor in driving fire regimes towards longer and more intense fire seasons across the Southwest.