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).
Across the western United States, the three primary drivers of tree mortality and carbon balance are bark beetles, timber harvest, and wildfire. While these agents of forest change frequently overlap, uncertainty remains regarding their interactions and influence on specific subsequent fire effects such as change in canopy cover.
Extreme wildfires have substantial economic, social and environmental impacts, but there is uncertainty whether such events are inevitable features of the Earth’s fire ecology or a legacy of poor management and planning.
Burn severity products created by the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project were used to analyse historical trends in burn severity.
Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements.
Post-fire snags provide important resources for cavity nesting communities as well as being subject to timber removal through salvage logging practices. Tools that can characterize their distributions along with other features important as wildlife habitat, such as woody shrub cover, would be useful for research and management purposes.
Fire severity maps are an important tool for understanding fire effects on a landscape. The relative differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) is a commonly used severity index in California forests, and is typically divided into four categories: unchanged, low, moderate, and high.
Analyses to identify and relate trends in wildfire activity to factors such as climate, population, land use or land cover and wildland fire policy are increasingly popular in the United States.
Comprehensive assessment of ecological change after fires have burned forests and rangelands is important if we are to understand, predict and measure fire effects. We highlight the challenges in effective assessment of fire and burn severity in the field and using both remote sensing and simulation models.
Bark beetle-caused tree mortality affects important forest ecosystem processes. Remote sensing methodologies that quantify live and dead basal area (BA) in bark beetle-affected forests can provide valuable information to forest managers and researchers.