Fuels & Fuel Treatments
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While prescribed fire and mechanical treatments in shrublands experiencing tree expansion restored understory vegetation and prevented continued juniper and pinyon infilling and growth, these fuel treatments also increased modeled surface fire behavior. Thus, management tradeoffs occur between desired future vegetation and wildfire risk after fuel treatments.
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It’s been a weird year so far. The west experienced an exceptionally cool and moist spring, especially in the southern extent of the region. Combined with above average snowpack, fuels stayed moist, and the fire season has had a very slow start. In fact, June saw the lowest area burned since 2000, but despite the slow start over 400 locations in the conterminous US have experienced record temperatures. Moreover, we have seen several weeks of anomalous heat waves, especially in the southwestern US. Yet still the fire season is slower than normal, but fuels are drying out fast.
In this 22-minute webcast, Research Ecologist Dr. Matt Reeves analyzes rangeland fuel conditions across the western US by evaluating the main factors of fuel amount and type, proximity to larger diameter fuel, drought conditions, and level of curing leading to senescent grasses in our simple but transparent hotspot algorithm. All 2022 recordings are located on the Reading the Tea Leaves page.
Webinar recording.
In this LANDFIRE Office Hour, Kim Ernstrom, and Wendy Detwiler, Wildland Fire Management RD&A, Technical Leads IFTDSS (and Josh Hyde: Tech Transfer Specialist, University of Idaho) discuss the basics of using IFTDSS for fuels planning. We also discuss practical examples of how IFTDSS is being used in the field.
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This research used in-depth interviews to explore variable support or opposition to three fuels-reduction projects occurring in the same region of north central Washington State, USA. Results indicate that differential support or opposition to each project stemmed from a unique combination of social factors operating in each locality (e.g., past history with fuels treatments, values for public land, environmental advocacy networks), the relationships that local populations had with agency members conducting each treatment, and the ways that managers engaged populations in the design of each treatment. We used existing frameworks for understanding collaborative potential/environmental conflict and for documenting the influence of local social context on adaptive wildfire actions to help explain emergent lessons about support or opposition to each project.
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We found that there were large proportions of non-significant responses among all categories combined, with roughly half or more of all responses non-significant (48 percent for wildlife, 60 percent for vegetation-environmental), comparable to other recent systematic reviews of pinyon-juniper treatment effects. However, we also found that when there were significant responses, some important trends potentially emerged. Important undesirable outcomes included far more positive than negative responses of exotic grass and forb abundance among nearly all treatment types. Cutting treatments were also more likely to decrease biocrust cover and microbial activity. Potentially beneficial outcomes included mostly positive responses among sagebrush obligate species, including more positive than negative responses for mule deer and sage-grouse. Some treatment types (for example, mastication) also resulted in more positive than negative responses for native grasses and forbs (although, non-significant responses were the majority). We also highlighted many limitations of this review, including how responses often come from few studies, and how some response-treatment category combinations lack adequate response data. Moreover, the existing research is often insufficient to address many key questions about treatment effects, largely owing to short time-scales and limited spatial extents of observations, which do not match the size of treatments being implemented by land managers, nor capture long-term, post-treatment ecological dynamics. We also identify a lack of research that addresses key interactions that could undermine restoration objectives, including potential effects of climate change and grazing on post-treatment environments. Thus, we emphasize the importance of integrating these factors into future pinyon-juniper treatment research, and we stress the need for use of monitoring programs and research studies that partake in data collection and analysis over long durations and broad spatial scales.
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By connecting high-resolution estimates of fine fuel to climatic, biophysical and land-use factors, wildfire exposure, and a natural resource value at risk, we provide a pro-active and adaptive framework for fire risk management within highly variable and rapidly changing dryland landscapes.
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In this webcast, Research Ecologist Dr. Matt Reeves analyzes rangeland fuel conditions across California by evaluating the main factors of fuel amount and type, proximity to larger diameter fuel, drought conditions, and level of curing leading to senescent grasses in our simple but transparent hotspot algorithm. Projections are based on Reeves’ Fuelcasting system – a component of the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service that provides projections of expected fuel conditions this grazing season.
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The West Coast both experiences the largest smoke exposures and contributes most to the burden of smoke PM2.5 in the western US. Applying prescribed burns on the coast yields large benefits for the West, while doing so in other states has relatively smaller impacts. Larger prescribed burns may reduce smoke impacts from future large wildfires, but few such burns have occurred in key areas.
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To inform wildland fire management under these conditions, we developed high-resolution (10-m) estimates of fine fuel across the Altar Valley in southern Arizona, USA, which spans dryland, grass-dominated ecosystems that are administered by multiple land managers and owners. We coupled field measurements at the end of the 2021 growing season with Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and vegetation indices acquired during and after the growing season to develop predictions of fine fuel across the entire valley. We then assessed how climate, soil, vegetation, and land-use factors influenced the amount and distribution of fine fuels. We connected fine fuels to fire management points, past ignition history, and socio-economic vulnerability to evaluate wildfire exposure and assessed how fuel related to habitat of the endangered masked bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus ridgwayi).
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In fire, fuels weather and topography mean everything. Fuels weather and topography and the timing of these components of the fire triangle must align properly for large fires to occur. Despite uncharacteristically large and continuous fuelbeds in numerous areas, however, it’s been a slow start to the fire season in the coterminous US.
In this webcast, Research Ecologist Dr. Matt Reeves analyzes rangeland fuel conditions across the West with an emphasis on how fire weather and rangeland fuels have not yet converged in 2023. All 2022 recordings are located on the Reading the Tea Leaves page.
Projections are based on Reeves’ Fuelcasting system – a component of the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service that provides projections of expected fuel conditions this grazing season.