Search Results:
View fact sheet.
With narrowing and potentially non-existent opportunities during other times of year, winter may currently be the most realistic and advantageous time to conduct prescribed burns. This study evaluated the effectiveness and feasibility of winter burning to demonstrate its potential utility in mixed conifer forests.
View article.
Tree planting has long been promoted to avert climate change and has received renewed impetus in recent years with the Bonn Challenge and related forest restoration initiatives guided by the forest and landscape restoration (FLR) framework. Much of the focus for reforestation and afforestation is on developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America, where large areas of rangelands in drylands and grassy biomes are portrayed as “degraded,” “unused,” and in need of more trees. This perception is rooted in persistent theories on forests and desertification that widely shaped colonial policy and practice and remain influential in today’s science-policy frameworks. From a rangelands perspective, the global FLR thrust raises two main concerns. First, inappropriate understandings of the ecology of drylands and grassy biomes encourage afforestation, grazing restriction and fire suppression, with negative impacts on hydrology, carbon storage, biodiversity, livestock production and pastoral livelihoods. Second, their target-driven approach requires large-scale afforestation and massive funding to achieve. Nearly half of the area pledged to the Bonn Challenge is in fact destined for forestry and other commercial plantations, which threaten pastoral livelihoods and cause ecological damage while having very limited potential to mitigate climate change. As the officially endorsed framework of the Bonn Challenge and related global restoration initiatives, FLR has become a powerful instrument for guiding global restoration efforts and funding. Its proponents have a responsibility to ensure that the framework is evidence-based and underpinned by appropriate ecological models for different ecoregions.
View report.
This “Sagebrush Conservation Strategy—Challenges to Sagebrush Conservation,” is an overview and assessment of the challenges facing land managers and landowners in conserving sagebrush ecosystems. This strategy is intended to provide guidance so that the unparalleled collaborative efforts to conserve the iconic greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) by State and Federal agencies, Tribes, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and stakeholders can be expanded to the entire sagebrush biome to benefit the people and wildlife that depend on this ecosystem. This report is organized into 3 parts.
Part I. Importance of the Sagebrush Biome to People and Wildlife; Part II. Change Agents in the Sagebrush Biome—Extent, Impacts, and Effort to Address Them; and Part III. Current Conservation Paradigm and Other Conservation Needs for Sagebrush
In 2009, new guidance for wildland fire management in the United States expanded the range of strategic options for managers working to reduce the threat of high-severity wildland fire, improve forest health and respond to a changing climate. Markedly, the new guidance provided greater flexibility to manage wildland fires to meet multiple resource objectives. We use Incident Status Summary reports to understand how wildland fire management strategies have differed across the western US in recent years and how management has changed since the 2009 Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy. When controlling for confounding variation, we found the 2009 Policy Guidance along with other concurrent advances in fire management motivated an estimated 27 to 73% increase in the number of fires managed with expanded strategic options, with only limited evidence of an increase in size or annual area burned. Fire weather captured a manager’s intent and allocation of fire management resources relative to burning conditions, where a manager’s desire and ability to suppress is either complemented by fire weather, at odds with fire weather, or put aside due to other priorities. We highlight opportunities to expand the use of strategic options in fire-adapted forests to improve fuel heterogeneity.
Conference website.
The Oregon SageCon Partnership met November 2-3, 2022, in Burns, Oregon. You can access presentations, resources, and recordings using the link provided.
Summit Themes
- Connect local, state, and federal partners working toward resilient rangelands in southeastern Oregon and across the Great Basin.
- Share information, ideas and resources to leverage our collective knowledge, with an emphasis on strategies for addressing invasive annual grasses in our rangelands.
- Inspire action and support collaborative efforts in 2023 and beyond.
Online course registration.
IFTDSS for Prescribed Fire Plans course is available anytime on the Wildland Fire Learning Portal. You can enroll yourself in this on-demand online course once you enter the Wildland Fire Learning Portal. Select “How to Use IFTDSS for Rx Burn Plans” on the righthand side.
View article.
Transboundary risk requires collaborative governance that attends to the distribution of power, authority, and capacity across the range of actors relevant to particular fire-prone landscapes. Wildfire is also changing in unprecedented ways and multiple, interacting uncertainties make predicting future wildfires difficult. Anticipatory governance can build our capacity to integrate uncertainty into wildfire decision-making and manage risk in proactive ways. Finally, competing interests and values mean that trade-offs are inherent to the wildfire problem. Risk governance links science and society through deliberative, participatory processes that explicitly navigate tradeoffs and build legitimacy for actions to address wildfire risk. Governance approaches that better target the nature of the wildfire problem will improve our ability to coexist with fire today and in the future.
View article.
We evaluated the prominence and function of feedback loops embedded in cognitive maps—beliefs about patterns of causal relationships that drive system dynamics—elicited from a diverse cross-section of stakeholders in a fire-prone region in the U.S. West. We demonstrate that cognition of feedback loops is rare among individuals, but increasingly prominent within aggregations of cognitive maps, which underscores the importance of collaborative decision-making. Our analysis further reveals a bias toward perception of amplifying feedback loops and of loops in which management actions result in desirable outcomes, which points to areas where progress may be made in reforming wildfire risk governance.
View fact sheet.
Oregon Health Authority and the University of Oregon partnered to conduct a survey-based evaluation of wildfire smoke communications and impacts experienced by Oregon residents during the 2020 wildfire season. The purpose of this survey was to (1) understand how Oregonians respond to wildfire smoke and (2) provide an open-source evaluation tool and data to support wildfire smoke communication practitioners in Oregon.