Fuels & Fuel Treatments
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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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We did not detect a difference in mean pyrogenic carbon (PyC) concentration of the mineral soil between the spring burns and the unburned controls; however, the spring burn plots did contain a number of isolated pockets with very high concentrations of PyC, suggesting a patchier burn pattern for these plots. In general, there was no detectable difference in any of the response variables when comparing the various prescribed burn treatments to one another. Reestablishing fire in these forests resulted in minor effects on the PyC concentration and pH, which may have beneficial impacts on soil carbon and available nutrients, while having few effects on other soil characteristics. This suggests that the application of low severity prescribed fires should result in little detrimental change to soils of ponderosa pine forests of the Southern Blue Mountains, while achieving management objectives such as reduction of surface fuels.
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In this issue:
Bird Communities in Transition after Treatments
Using Predictive Tools to Improve Seeding Success
There are two key takeaways from the research: 1) conifer removal is an effective tool for increasing sage grouse populations, and 2) sage grouse populations may take several years to respond to management actions because they are long lived and have lower reproductive output compared to other game birds.
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Study findings include:
- From 2011-2017, the extent of conifer cover in sagebrush country decreased by 1.6%. Human management efforts are responsible for 2/3 of the total reduction; the other 1/3 is due to wildfires.
- Previous estimates suggest that conifer cover in sagebrush country is growing by 0.4%-1.5% annually, which means that our efforts are keeping pace with conifer encroachment but that more needs to be done.
- Public/private partnerships are successfully reducing conifers in highly targeted priority watersheds, such as in northwest Utah.
- The maps also show that woodlands are still expanding into many sagebrush landscapes. Continued partnership efforts are needed to strategically conserve priority shrublands.
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Many studies have examined how fuels, topography, climate, and fire weather influence fire severity. Less is known about how different forest management practices influence fire severity in multi‐owner landscapes, despite costly and controversial suppression of wildfires that do not acknowledge ownership boundaries. In 2013, the Douglas Complex burned over 19,000 ha of Oregon & California Railroad (O&C) lands in Southwestern Oregon, USA. O&C lands are composed of a checkerboard of private industrial and federal forestland (Bureau of Land Management, BLM) with contrasting management objectives, providing a unique experimental landscape to understand how different management practices influence wildfire severity. Leveraging Landsat based estimates of fire severity (Relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio, RdNBR) and geospatial data on fire progression, weather, topography, pre‐fire forest conditions, and land ownership, we asked (1) what is the relative importance of different variables driving fire severity, and (2) is intensive plantation forestry associated with higher fire severity?
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Reasons and consequences of pinyon-juniper expansion and treatment options are provided in a graphic summary.
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Today many forested landscapes in western states have a “fire debt.” Humans have prevented normal levels of fire from occurring, and the bill has come due. Increasingly severe weather conditions and longer fire seasons due to climate change are making fire management problems more pressing today than they were just a few decades ago. And the problem will only get worse.
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This study evaluated whether tree removal by burning can decrease late‐succession woodland ecohydrologic resilience by increasing vegetation and ground cover over a 9‐year period after fire and whether the soil erosion feedback on late‐succession woodlands is reversible by burning. To address these questions, we employed a suite of vegetation and soil measurements and rainfall simulation and concentrated overland flow experiments across multiple plot scales on unburned and burned areas at two sagebrush sites in the later stages of woodland succession.
Linear fuel breaks may help reduce wildfire intensity and spread, and at the same time improve firefighting effectiveness, but their ecological impacts may include habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as facilitation of species movement. There is very little peer‐reviewed science available to inform land managers about the ecological effects of fuel breaks. As such, land managers may face trade‐offs with uncertain outcomes: either substantially alter habitats with fuel breaks to potentially minimize wildfire impacts or risk increased habitat loss and degradation from wildfire. The Great Basin region of the western US offers an opportunity to better understand the relative costs and benefits of fuel breaks, and to identify key knowledge gaps