The Natural Range of Variation is a description of the conditions of an ecosystem over space and time. Read more at: Fire Facts: What is? Natural Range of Variability
Fuel moisture content (FMC) is a measure of the amount of water in a fuel, such as vegetation, available to a fire, and is expressed as a percent of the dry weight of that specific fuel. Read more at, Fire Facts: What is? Fuel Moisture Content
Changes in land use and management practices throughout the past century–in addition to drought and other stressors exacerbated by climate change–have degraded the nation’s forests and led to overgrowth and accumulation of hazardous fuels (GAO 2015). Because of these fuels, some forests now see high-severity fires that threaten communities as well as important natural and cultural resources.
The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy is a collaboration effort involving federal and state agencies, local governments, tribes, and interested stakeholders throughout the nation to improve coordination across the various jurisdictions for managing wildfire. Read more at Fire Facts: What is? The National Cohesive Strategy
This document is intended as a “How To” guide for managers and stakeholders wishing to implement the Individual, Clumps, and Openings (ICO) method for silvicultural prescriptions and/or monitoring. Since its release in 2013, ICO has undergone a lot of development and improvement.
The Available Science Assessment Project (ASAP) leads, EcoAdapt and Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, hosted a workshop during the International Association of Wildland Fire’s 5th Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference, in cooperation with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network.
Oregon's State Wood Energy Team (SWET) is a state-level network supported by the United States Forest Service and led by Oregon Department of Forestry. The purpose of the SWET is to bring together experts in biomass energy to support the successful development and implemen-tation of wood energy systems and businesses.
Continued conflict around natural resource management and dwindled public confidence in land management agencies has necessitated the development of a new collaborative social contract for land management in the West. However, even within the sphere of collaboration, restoring the key characteristics of landscape resilience to landscapes has been a challenge. Science has a golden opportunity to help inform a sound socio-ecological approach to restorative management, which can be understood by all land ownership and partners. To help guide these landscape planning efforts, researchers have created a framework of seven core principles and their implications for management of fire-prone interior forest landscapes.
In this paper, researchers examine the problem of growing wildfire risk through a coupled natural and human systems (CNHS) perspective. They characterized the primary social and ecological dimensions of what they termed a socioecological pathology of wildfire risk in temperate forests, or “a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales.” By paying particular attention to the wildfire risk governance system, which is influenced by both ecological conditions and diverse parties with competing goals, policies, and practices, the authors investigate strategies for reducing wildfire risk.
This study investigated the long-term response of understory vegetation to two post-fire logging treatments (commercial salvage logging with and without additional fuel reduction logging) in northeastern Oregon. Researchers assessed if there were lasting effects on understory plant cover, species diversity, plant community composition, and exotic species cover in experimental treatment units 15 years post-treatment. The study area is located within the area burned by the 1996 Summit Fire, which burned mostly at high severity although it occurred in dry coniferous forests that historically burned at frequent intervals (14-16 years) and at low severity.