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With concern over the health of aspen in the Intermountain West, public and private land managers need better guidance for evaluating aspen condition and selecting and implementing actions that will be effective in restoring aspen health. The Utah Forest Restoration Group collaboratively synthesized a step-by-step approach for aspen restoration that was applicable to western U.S. forests. In a successful case study in shared stewardship, these restoration guidelines were applied to a challenging real-world setting.
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This study reports an automated method of mapping rangeland fractional component cover over a large portion of the northern Great Basin, from 1986 to 2016 using a dense Landsat imagery time series. Over the 30‐yr period, shrub cover declined and bare ground increased. While few pixels had >10% cover change, a large majority had at least some change. All fractional components had significant spatial relationships with water year precipitation (WYPRCP), maximum temperature (WYTMAX), and minimum temperature (WYTMIN) in all years. Shrub and sagebrush cover in particular respond positively to warming WYTMIN, resulting from the largest increases in WYTMIN being in the coolest and wettest areas, and respond negatively to warming WYTMAX because the largest increases in WYTMAX are in the warmest and driest areas. The trade‐off of lowering temporal density against removing cloud‐contaminated years is justified as temporal density appears to have only a modest impact on trends and climate relationships until n ≤ 6, but multi‐year gaps are proportionally more influential. Gradual change analysis is likely to be less sensitive to n than abrupt change. These data can be used to answer critical questions regarding the influence of climate change and the suitability of management practices.
Discussion Recording.
An informal discussion on current fuel break knowledge from science and management. Brief presentations on the latest in fuel break science and practice, and discussions around your fuel break questions.
Presenters: Doug Shinneman, Research Fire Ecologist with USGS, and Lance Okeson, Fire Management Officer with Boise District BLM
This is the fifth of six webinars in our Fuel Breaks in Sagebrush Country: A Multidisciplinary Webinar Series and Discussion.
To learn about other webinars in the series, see the webinar series webpage.
This webinar features:
A fuels treatment success story in the Pine Nut Mountains of Nevada – Keith Barker, BLM
Successes and challenges with a suite of fuel break projects – Lance Okeson, BLM
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Results suggest that dry forest species are undergoing an active range shift driven by both changing recruitment and mortality, and that increasing temperatures and drought threaten the long-term viability of many of these species in their current range. While four of the five species examined were experiencing some declines, Pinus edulis is currently most vulnerable. Management actions such as reducing tree density may be able to mitigate some of these impacts. The framework we present to estimate range-wide demographic rates can be applied to other species to determine where range contractions are most likely.
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It is clear that the state of knowledge based on empirical evidence is at its infancy. This is likely because of the vast challenges associated with designing and implementing sampling designs that account for combinations of spatial and temporal configurations prior to wildfire occurrence. We also suspect part of the reason empirical evidence is lacking is because the distinction between site-level and landscape-level effects is not well recognized in the literature. All papers used the term landscape, but rarely defined the landscape, and some specified identifying landscape-level effects that were truly site-level effects. Future research needs to develop innovative ways to interpret the role of fuel treatments at the landscape level to provide insight on strategic designs and approaches to maximize fuel treatment effectiveness.
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This presentation will focus on findings from JFSP-supported graduate research on post-fire conifer establishment following recent wildfires in eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Given shifting climate and wildfire regimes, managers and researchers seek information on forest resilience and recovery trajectories. Understanding establishment and growth rates post-fire is pertinent both to fuels management planning, in cases of overabundant regeneration, as well as to decisions surrounding replanting for sites with limited post-fire regeneration. The presentation will summarize current knowledge on the relative influence of site-level versus climatic factors affecting regeneration in western North America, and present data from the Blue Mountains ecoregion.
The webinar informs participants about the new LANDFIRE Remap products, what has changed from previous product offerings, and what remains the same or has been updated. It offers application examples taken from the SW region, and will save time to answer questions and listen to comments at the webinar’s conclusion. The presentation is directed those who are or might be considering using LANDFIRE products to inform fire and vegetation management decisions, e.g. researchers, land and project managers, fire and fuel professionals, GIS specialists, scientists, and students.
Kori Blankenship, Fire Ecologist and Jim Smith, Program Lead, of The Nature Conservancy’s LANDFIRE Team, present.
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Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge. The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States (US) following a century of fire exclusion. This has translated into calls from scientists and policy experts for more prescribed fire, particularly in the Western US, where fire activity has escalated in recent decades. The annual extent of prescribed burning in the Western US remained stable or decreased from 1998 to 2018, while 70% of all prescribed fire was completed primarily by non-federal entities in the Southeastern US. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the only federal agency to substantially increase prescribed fire use, potentially associated with increased tribal self-governance. This suggests that the best available science is not being adopted into management practices, thereby further compounding the fire deficit in the Western US and the potential for more wildfire disasters.
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In this study we used the 79 western US national forests to examine tradeoffs between forest management scenarios targeting wildfire risk to the wildland urban interface (WUI) and those meeting agency convertible volume production targets. We quantified production frontiers to measure how the efficiency of meeting harvest volume targets is affected by prioritizing treatments to areas that transmit fire to the WUI. The results showed strong tradeoffs and scale effects on production frontiers, and more importantly substantial variation among planning areas and national forests. Prioritizing treatments to reduce fire transmission to the WUI resulted in an average harvest volume reduction of about 248m3 per ha treated. The analysis also identified opportunities where both management objectives can be achieved. This work represents the first large-scale tradeoff analysis for key management goals in forest and fuel management programs on national forests.