Fire historically occurred across the sagebrush steppe, but little is known about how patterns of post-fire fuel accumulation influence future fire in Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) communities.
Prescribed fire is an active management tool used to address wildfire hazard and ecological concerns associated with fire exclusion and suppression over the past century.
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.
Artemisia tridentata ssp. vaseyana ecosystems evolved with periodic fire, but invasive grasses, conifer encroachment, fire suppression, and climate change have resulted in altered fire regimes and plant communities. Post-fire increases in invasive annual grasses such as Bromus tectorum and reductions in native vegetation are common across the sagebrush steppe.
Land managers typically make post hoc assessments of the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning (FRB), but often lack a rigorous sampling framework. A general, but untested, assumption is that variability in soil and fuel properties increases from small (∼1 m) to large spatial scales (∼10–100 km).
Disturbances create fluctuations in resource availability that alter abiotic and biotic constraints. Exotic invader response may be due to multiple factors related to disturbance regimes and complex interactions between other small- and largescale abiotic and biotic processes that may vary across invasion stages.
Emissions from burning piles of post-harvest timber slash (Douglas-fir) in Grande Ronde, Oregon were sampled using an instrument platform lofted into the plume using a tether-controlled aerostat or balloon.
Fire suppression and other factors have resulted in high wildfire risk in the western US, and prescribed burning can be an effective tool for thinning forests and reducing fuels to lessen wildfire risks. However, prescribed burning sometimes fails to substantially reduce fuels and sometimes damages and kills valuable, large trees.
Prescribed burning is a primary tool for habitat restoration and management in fire-adapted grasslands. Concerns about detrimental effects of burning on butterfly populations, however, can inhibit implementation of treatments.
In fire-prone forests, self-reinforcing fire behavior may generate a mosaic of vegetation types and structures. In forests long subject to fire exclusion, such feedbacks may result in forest loss when surface and canopy fuel accumulations lead to unusually severe fires.