Fuels & Fuel Treatments
View webinar recording.
With increasing fire season duration and complexities in the fire management environment come opportunities to scale up the application of prescribed fire. In this webinar, we will explore the challenges climate change poses for fire managers, as well as the opportunities present in more numerous and longer prescribed burn windows with the increasing availability of fuels to burn.
Visit Cal Fire wildfire preparedness website.
Many resources are available on preparing and preventing wildfire and living and coping after wildfire.
View recording.
“Learn and Burn” workshops are an excellent way for private landowners and others to gain hands-on burning experience and knowledge from expert mentors. This webinar will provide some lessons learned from coordinating these events, and tips to putting one on in the future. Participants will be provided with a template checklist, examples of past agendas, ideas for potential partners and funding opportunities, suggestions on how to measure program impact, and successes from past events. Are you thinking of planning one of these events?
Access webinar recording.
Millions of acres of fuels reduction treatments are being implemented each year in the fire adapted forests of the US. Typical these fuel reduction treatments target small diameter trees for removal producing large amounts of unmerchantable woody material and elevating surface fuel loadings. Often this material has no market value and is piled by hand or with heavy machinery and burned on site. We studied replicated experimental pile burns from two locations (Wenatchee, WA and Santa Clara, NM) over three years. We examined the effects of time since construction (i.e., pile age) and burn season (fall and spring) on fuel bed properties, combustion dynamics, fuel consumption, and charcoal formation for hand-constructed piles in thinned ponderosa pine-dominated sites. The webinar will also touch on pile decomposition rates and unplanned fire in areas with piled fuels.
Access guide.
This guide describes the process the Klamath-Lake Forest Partnership (KLFHP) has used to plan and implement cross-boundary restoration projects to achieve improved forest health conditions on large landscapes scales. It is intended as a model other individuals and communities can modify to meet the needs of their local circumstances.
The Exploration Tool is designed for resource managers to use when planning land treatments. The tool provides useful summaries of environmental characteristics of planned treatment areas and facilitates adaptive management practices by comparing those characteristics to other similar treatments within a specified distance or area of interest.
View article.
In this study, we used longer-term data to evaluate the relationships among soil climate conditions, perennial herbaceous cover, and cheatgrass cover following fuel management treatments across the environmental gradients that characterize sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin. Both prescribed fire and mechanical treatments increased soil water availability on woodland sites and perennial herbaceous cover on some woodland and sagebrush sites. Prescribed fire also slightly increased soil temperatures and especially increased cheatgrass cover compared to no treatment and mechanical treatments on most sites. Non-metric dimensional scaling ordination and decision tree partition analysis indicated that sites with warmer late springs and warmer and wetter falls had higher cover of cheatgrass. Sites with wetter winters and early springs (March-April) had higher cover of perennial herbs. Our findings suggest that site resistance to cheatgrass after fire and fuel control treatments decreases with a warmer and drier climate. This emphasizes the need for management actions to maintain and enhance perennial herb cover, such as implementing appropriate grazing management, and revegetating sites that have low abundance of perennial herbs in conjunction with fuel control treatments.
Access map.
The LANDFIRE Web–Hosted Applications Map WHAM! is an online, interactive map that calls up many of the applications, their locations, and the partners we work with. It’s easy as point–and–click! Hover over a “point,” click on it, and learn how LANDFIRE products helped land managers meet their planning objectives. Use the checkboxes at the bottom right of the map to view projects by categories.
View research brief.
In this study, we conducted a field and data synthesis of nine years of annual plant communities occurring below perennial plants the National Park Service (NPS) had outplanted in 2008. At 30 sites disturbed by road construction and that were revegetated by NPS, we measured annual and perennial plants in 2009 (one year after nursery-grown perennials were outplanted at the sites), 2010, 2011, and 2017 (nine years after restoration). We also made these same measurements below vertical mulch structures.
View research brief.
In this study, researchers measured vegetation structure and fuel moisture (pre-burn), weather conditions, belowground heat dosages, and peak temperatures (during the burn), and burn severities and unburned refugia (post-burn) for paired morning and afternoon prescribed burns at each of ten prairie sites throughout the south Puget Sound in 2014.