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For more than a century ecosystems around the world have experienced an increase in the dominance of woody species. While the drivers of woody plant proliferation are complex, interactions between climate and land-use change are commonly invoked as…
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Fire has had a profound historical role in shaping dry mixed conifer forests in the western United States. However, the uncertainty and complexity of prescribed fires raises the question "Is fire always the best option for treating fuels?" The…
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Changes in the properties of an ash layer with time may affect the amount of post-fire runoff, particularly by the formation of ash surface crusts. The formation of depositional crusts by ash have been observed at the pore and plot scales, but the…
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Dr. Dick Hutto, professor of Organismal Biology and Ecology at the University of Montana, took participants of the May 2014 Large Wildland Fires Conference to recently burned sites to discuss fire effects. Hutto was enthused and excited about “the…
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Mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks within the previous 10-15 years have affected millions of hectares of lodgepole pine forests in western North America. Concerns about the influence of recent tree mortality on changes in fire behaviour amongst…
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The scientific basis for restoration of fire-excluded western larch/mixed-conifer forests is not as well developed as that for dry fire-frequent forests. We compared the effects of wildfire and restoration (combined thinning and prescribed fire) in…
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While the use of timber harvests is generally accepted as an effective approach to controlling bark beetles during outbreaks, in reality there has been a dearth of monitoring to assess outcomes, and failures are often not reported. Additionally, few…
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Mastication is an increasingly common fuels treatment that redistributes 'ladder' fuels to the forest floor to reduce vertical fuel continuity, crown fire potential, and fireline intensity, but fuel models do not exist for predicting fire…
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Reference conditions describe attributes of ecosystem structure, composition, and function and are used to inform ecological restoration efforts. Reference condition information on tree spatial patterns that occurred prior to wide-spread fire…
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Determining appropriate actions to create or maintain landscapes resilient to climate change is challenging because of uncertainty associated with potential effects of climate change and their interactions with land management. We used a set of…
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Several mechanical approaches to managing vegetation fuels hold promise when applied to the dry mixed conifer forests in the western United States. These are most useful to treat surface, ladder, and crown fuels. There are a variety of techniques to…
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Recent work has demonstrated that evolutionary processes shape ecological dynamics on relatively short timescales (eco-evolutionary dynamics), but demonstrating these effects at large spatial scales in natural landscapes has proven difficult. We…
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Accurate assessment of changing fire regimes is important, since climatic change and people may be promoting more wildfires. Government wildland fire policies and restoration programmes in dry western US forests are based on the hypothesis that high…
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More frequent fire activity associated with climate warming is expected to increase the extent of young forest stands in fire-prone landscapes, yet growth rates and biomass allocation patterns in young forests that regenerated naturally following…
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Live fuel moisture content (LFMC), the ratio of water mass to dry mass contained in live plant material, is an important fuel property for determining fire danger and for modeling fire behavior. Remote sensing estimation of LFMC often relies on an…
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Insect outbreaks are often assumed to increase the severity or probability of fire occurrence through increased fuel availability, while fires may in turn alter susceptibility of forests to subsequent insect outbreaks through changes in the spatial…
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There is widespread concern that fire exclusion has led to an unprecedented threat of uncharacteristically severe fires in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex. Laws) and mixed-conifer forests of western North America. These extensive montane…
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The Future Forest Webinar Series facilitated dialogue between scientists and managers about the challenges and opportunities created by the mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic. The series consisted of six webinar facilitated by the USFS Rocky…
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Bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires are principal drivers of change in western North American forests, and both have increased in severity and extent in recent years. These two agents of disturbance interact in complex ways to shape forest structure…
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We demonstrated the utility of digital fire atlases by analyzing forest fire extent across cold, dry, and mesic forests, within and outside federally designated wilderness areas during three different fire management periods: 1900 to 1934, 1935 to…
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