Fire Behavior
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Much of the Murphy Wildland Fire Complex burned under extreme fuel and weather conditions that likely overshadowed livestock grazing as a factor influencing fire extent and fuel consumption in many areas where these fires burned. Differences and abrupt contrast lines in the level of fuels consumed were affected mostly by the plant communities that existed on a site before fire. A few abrupt contrasts in burn severity coincided with apparent differences in grazing patterns of livestock, observed as fence-line contrasts. Fire modeling revealed that grazing in grassland vegetation can reduce surface rate of spread and fire-line intensity to a greater extent than in shrubland types. Under extreme fire conditions (low fuel moisture, high temperatures, and gusty winds), grazing applied at moderate utilization levels has limited or negligible effects on fire behavior. However, when weather and fuel-moisture conditions are less extreme, grazing may reduce the rate of spread and intensity of fires allowing for patchy burns with low levels of fuel consumption.
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Targeted livestock grazing must be carefully implemented and monitored to meet fuels management objectives on an annual and long-term basis. Grazing to reduce fuels on a landscape must be both strategic and surgical. Surgical means that targeted livestock grazing will be done to the level and limited to the minimum area needed to meet fuel and landscape or project management objectives within BLM’s regulatory framework. Therefore, sound project planning is essential.
View the Ted Talk.
The Era of Megafires is a 70-minute, multi-media presentation hosted by Dr. Paul Hessburg, who has conducted fire and landscape ecology research for more than 27 years. The presented material comes in the form of fast-moving, short, topic-based talks interspersed with compelling video vignettes and features the work of wildfire photographer, John Marshall. Think Ted X mixed with snappy documentary shorts and compelling photography. The videos are produced by award-winning documentary film company, North 40 Productions, of Wenatchee, WA.
The presentation is designed to educate audiences across the West so that they may better participate in the conversation and solutions surrounding the Megafire issue.
Sponsors for this event include U.S. Forest Service Intermountain Region, Salmon-Challis National Forest and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network.
The presentation will take place at the Sacajawea Center in Salmon, Idaho. Doors will open at 6:30PM, and the presentation will begin at 7:00PM.
The LANDFIRE Program strives to produce consistent fire behavior fuel model grids for the U.S. These models are relevant for predicting fire behavior, including spread and intensity, during average conditions; however, they often fall short during drought or seasonably dry conditions.
To address the need for that information, LANDFIRE developed a seasonal product named the Modeling Dynamic-Fuels with an Index System (MoD-FIS). These provisional products have been released for the Southwest and Great Basin regions, and are ready for testing and review by those who use LANDFIRE data. In this webinar, Charley Martin and Tobin Smail offer a MoD-FIS primer, explain how the products can be used in these regions, and solicit users’ input and review.
This webinar was co-hosted by LANDFIRE and members of the Joint Fire Science Program: Great Basin Fire Science, Southwest Fire Science, and Northern Rockies Fire Science. Content addresses challenges that managers of large landscapes deal with in these regions.
90 second video.
In this video, Matthew Hurteau — assistant professor of forest resources at Penn State University — explains how warming temperatures, prolonged drought, and a century’s worth of fire suppression policy are “priming the system to make it more flammable.”
The Columbia University Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate is pleased to announce the conference “Fire Prediction Across Scales”, in New York City. The goal of the conference is to synthesize the cutting edge in fire prediction, ranging from the behavior of a single wildfire, to changes in global fire patterns over centuries.
The conference is intended for all in academia, government, and the private sector with an interest in the latest science behind fire prediction. Through a small set of invited talks, contributed posters, and discussion sessions, the conference will showcase the latest research on fire prediction and provide opportunities for networking and unstructured discussion.
For more information, visit conference website.
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In a nutshell, Finney and other forest experts say, periodic fires reduce fine fuels such as pine needles. They stop young conifer trees from growing into big conifers. Meadows form and break up continuous stands of mature forest.
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Researchers measured 14 transects across two different fuel treatment types on three different units. For both fuel treatment types, only ladder fuels had been removed. They found that while severity was reduced at all sites, the spatial distribution of fire severity within the treatment areas varied by treatment type and unit as well as which fire severity metric they were analyzing. They found fuel treatments reduced fire severity anywhere from -7 m to 533 m into the treatment area. Kennedy and Johnson (2014) caution that local site conditions, topography and vegetation type will be other sources of variation in fire severity.
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The fire characteristics chart is a graphical method of presenting U.S. National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indexes and components as well as primary surface or crown fire behavior characteristics. Computer software has been developed to produce fire characteristics charts for both fire danger and fire behavior in a format suitable for inclusion in reports and presentations. Scales, colors, labels, and legends can be modified as needed. The fire characteristics chart for fire behavior has been described previously (Andrews et al. 2011). This report describes the fire characteristics chart for fire danger, which displays the relationships among the Spread Component, Energy Release Component, and Burning Index by plotting the three values as a single point. Indices calculated by using FireFamilyPlus can be imported into the fire danger characteristics chart software. Example applications of this software for comparing fire seasons, weather stations, and fire danger rating fuel models are presented.
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This study investigated the complex relationships among weather, fine fuels, and fire in the Great Basin, USA. It found that cheatgrass cover increased in years with higher precipitation and especially when one of the previous 3 years also was particularly wet. Area burned in a given year was mostly associated with native herb and non-native forb cover, whereas cheatgrass mainly influenced area burned in the form of litter derived from previous years’ growth. Results suggest that the region’s precipitation pattern of consecutive wet years followed by consecutive dry years results in a cycle of fuel accumulation followed by weather conditions that increase the probability of wildfire events in the year when the cycle transitions from wet to dry. These patterns varied regionally but were strong enough to allow us to model annual wildfire risk across the Great Basin based on precipitation alone.