January 2024
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25 Reads
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January 2024
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25 Reads
September 2022
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126 Reads
Web Table 1. To Jones et al 2022.
September 2022
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900 Reads
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17 Citations
Recent intense fire seasons in Australia, Borneo, South America, Africa, Siberia, and western North America have displaced large numbers of people, burned tens of millions of hectares, and generated societal urgency to address the wildfire problem (Bowman et al. 2020). Nearly all terrestrial ecosystems, however, burn with some degree of regularity, timing, and intensity; fire is a natural process. Wildfires are strongly influenced by climate and weather, which in turn shape the availability and flammability of fuels (Abatzoglou and Williams 2016). Yet rapid climate change is interacting with land-use legacies (eg fire suppression), transforming both wildfire and ecosystems (Coop et al. 2020; Hagmann et al. 2021). Like misinformation about climate, misinformation about wildfire has flourished in the media and in political discourse. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading evidence or discourse that counters best available science or expert consensus on a topic (Vraga and Bode 2020). Vulnerability to misinformation is often driven by distrust in media and institutions, and exacerbated by rapid spread over social media. By obstructing solutions to public health (eg COVID-19, childhood immunizations, tobacco use) and environmental issues (eg climate change), misinformation deters effective policy responses to societal threats.
October 2021
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686 Reads
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19 Citations
Fire has been an important catalyst of change in Pacific Northwest forests throughout the Holocene. The role of fire varied across this biophysically diverse region prior to European colonization, but fire exclusion and logging drastically altered forest conditions during the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite recent increases in area burned and several large wildfires with devastating social and economic consequences, area burned in recent decades remains far less than under historical regimes across most of the region. Some dry forest landscapes have experienced profound change through uncharacteristically severe fires. In moist and cold forest landscapes, wildfires have enhanced biodiversity through the creation of structurally complex early-seral habitats. Area burned is expected to double or triple in the future under a warming climate. Strategies to adapt to future wildfires vary among historical regimes and biophysical settings and will require collaborative engagement and adaptive management to facilitate ecological change at meaningful scales.
September 2021
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873 Reads
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7 Citations
Understanding ownership effects on large wildfires is a precursor to the development of risk governance strategies that better protect people and property and restore fire-adapted ecosystems. We analyzed wildfire events in the Pacific Northwest from 1984 to 2018 to explore how area burned responded to ownership, asking whether particular ownerships burned disproportionately more or less, and whether these patterns varied by forest and grass/shrub vegetation types. While many individual fires showed indifference to property lines, taken as a whole, we found patterns of disproportionate burning for both forest and grass/shrub fires. We found that forest fires avoided ownerships with a concentration of highly valued resources—burning less than expected in managed US Forest Service forested lands, private non-industrial, private industrial, and state lands—suggesting the enforcement of strong fire protection policies. US Forest Service wilderness was the only ownership classification that burned more than expected which may result from the management of natural ignitions for resource objectives, its remoteness or both. Results from this study are relevant to inform perspectives on land management among public and private entities, which may share boundaries but not fire management goals, and support effective cross-boundary collaboration and shared stewardship across all-lands.
September 2021
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223 Reads
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15 Citations
After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re‐evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington. The case for re‐evaluation is clearest where small‐ to large‐sized, immature, fast‐growing, fire‐intolerant trees have filled in forests after both a long period of fire exclusion and the harvest of large, old trees. This infilling has created abundant fuel ladders that increase patch and landscape vulnerability to severe wildfires, which now threaten many forests. As climate change continues to alter fire regimes, we recommend that landscape‐level planning is needed to determine where fire‐tolerant and intolerant forest successional conditions are best retained on the landscape. Critical to our proposal are effective public engagement, collaboration, and tribal consultation.
August 2019
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1,185 Reads
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68 Citations
The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) has guided the management of 17 federal forests in the US Pacific Northwest for the past 25 years. The existing management plans for these national forests – which were amended by the NWFP – are now being evaluated for revision under the US Forest Service's 2012 planning rule. To help inform federal land managers, we reviewed the scientific literature published since the inception of the NWFP and report several key findings: (1) conservation of at‐risk species within national forests is challenging in the face of threats that are beyond the control of federal managers, (2) management efforts to promote resilience to wildfire and climate change include restoring dynamics and structure at multiple scales and revisiting reserve design, (3) forest restoration can have an ecological and socioeconomic win–win outcome, (4) human communities benefit from many ecosystem services beyond the supply of timber, (5) collaboration among multiple stakeholders is essential for achieving ecological and socioeconomic goals, and (6) monitoring and adaptive management are crucial to learning about and addressing uncertainty.
July 2019
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1,730 Reads
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246 Citations
Before the advent of intensive forest management and fire suppression, western North American forests exhibited a naturally occurring resistance and resilience to wildfires and other disturbances. Resilience, which encompasses resistance, reflects the amount of disruption an ecosystem can withstand before its structure or organization qualitatively shift to a different basin of attraction. In fire-maintained forests, resilience to disturbance events arose primarily from vegetation pattern-disturbance process interactions at several levels of organization. Using evidence from 15 ecoregions, spanning forests from Canada to Mexico, we review the properties of forests that reinforced qualities of resilience and resistance. We show examples of multi-level landscape resilience, of feedbacks within and among levels, and how conditions have changed under climatic and management influences. We highlight geographic similarities and important differences in the structure and organization of historical landscapes, their forest types, and in the conditions that have changed resilience and resistance to abrupt or large-scale disruptions. We discuss the role of the regional climate in episodically or abruptly reorganizing plant and animal biogeography and forest resilience and resistance to disturbances. We give clear examples of these changes and suggest that managing for resilient forests is a construct that strongly depends on scale and human social values. It involves human communities actively working with the ecosystems they depend on, and the processes that shape them, to adapt landscapes, species, and human communities to climate change while maintaining core ecosystem processes and services. Finally, it compels us to embrace management approaches that incorporate ongoing disturbances and anticipated effects of climatic changes, and to support dynamically shifting patchworks of forest and non-forest. Doing so could make these shifting forest conditions and wildfire regimes less disruptive to individuals and society.
July 2019
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583 Reads
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51 Citations
The US Endangered Species Act has enabled species conservation but has differentially impacted fire management and rare bird conservation in the southern and western US. In the South, prescribed fire and restoration‐based forest thinning are commonly used to conserve the endangered red‐cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis; RCW), whereas in the West, land managers continue to suppress fire across the diverse habitats of the northern, Californian, and Mexican spotted owls (Strix occidentalis subspecies; SO). Although the habitat needs of the RCW and SO are not identical, substantial portions of both species’ ranges have historically been exposed to relatively frequent, low‐ to moderate‐intensity fires. Active management with fire and thinning has benefited the RCW but proves challenging in the western US. We suggest the western US could benefit from the adoption of a similar innovative approach through policy, public–private partnerships, and complementarity of endangered species management with multiple objectives. These changes would likely balance long‐term goals of SO conservation and enhance forest resilience.
April 2019
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30 Reads
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10 Citations
Journal of Forestry
Scientific knowledge and tools have central roles in contemporary federal forest programs that promote restoration in large landscapes and across ownerships. Although we know much about the role of science in decisionmaking and ways that science can be better linked to practice, we know less about manager perspectives about science and science tools, and the perceived role of both in planning. We surveyed Forest Service resource managers in the western United States to address this knowledge gap. Respondents engaged most frequently with science via reading research publications; direct engagement with scientists was less common. There was widespread agreement that science was a useful input to decisionmaking. Managers believed more weight should be placed on science in decisionmaking in cases of low public consensus than in cases of high public consensus. Managers with the most frequent engagement with science generally held more positive views towards science and its role in decisionmaking.
... For example, in western United States forests, the annual area burned at high severity has increased by eightfold since 1985 (Parks and Abatzoglou, 2020) and increasing high-severity patch size has been homogenizing forests (Singleton et al., 2021;Cova et al., 2023). The cause of changing fire regimes is context-specific and therefore depends on the system in question (Jones et al., 2022a). But the primary drivers typically include a combination of warming and drying climate conditions (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016;Juang et al., 2022) as well as past and ongoing fire exclusion resulting in homogenous conditions with unnaturally large accumulations of fuel (Koontz et al., 2020;Francis et al., 2023;Kreider et al., 2024). ...
September 2022
... California), delineated using EPA Level III Ecoregions (Commission for Environmental Cooperation, 1997) ( Figure 1). Climate, topography, and forest types vary widely across the northwestern United States (Hood et al., 2021;Reilly et al., 2021). Historical fire regimes range from frequent and predominantly low-severity fire in warmer and drier parts of the region to infrequent and predominantly high-severity fire in cooler and wetter parts of the region (Agee, 1993;Baker, 2009;Hood et al., 2021;Reilly et al., 2021). ...
October 2021
... Transboundary pollution such as smoke and pollutants from wildfires can cross national borders, affecting neighboring countries and even continents. This can lead to international tensions and the need for cross-border cooperation on air quality management [14,29]. Additionally, large-scale wildfires can influence global climate patterns, potentially affecting weather systems and contributing to phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. ...
September 2021
... Land management in the modern era faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climatic changes, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks (Millar et al. 2007;Millar and Stephenson 2015;Hessburg et al. 2015Hessburg et al. , 2021Schuurman et al. 2022). Wildfire poses both a challenge and a solution to these projected changes (Dombeck et al. 2004;North et al. 2015), and building climate-adapted forest landscapes will require restoring active wildfire regimes and reducing the fire deficit across much of the intermountain west (Moritz et al. 2014;Schoennagel et al. 2017;Hessburg et al. 2019). ...
September 2021
... AM was first utilised in the USFS in 1994 in the 10-million-hectare Northwest Forest Plan in response to over harvesting of the old-growth forests which serve as habitat for endangered wildlife such as the Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) [33], [34]. Lessons learned from over 25 years of applying AM in this plan are collaboration amongst stakeholders is key for achieving social-ecological goals and objectives, M&E in AM is vital for learning at multiple scales and for minimising uncertainty, AM can be costly, and that the plan is not adequately addressing climate change, wildfires, trade-offs and social values [33], [35]. The plan has been deemed a success in conserving old-growth forests and wildlife as originally intended [35]. ...
August 2019
... Forests in the southwestern USA have experienced natural disturbances such as wildfire and insect-caused mortality for millennia (Hessburg et al., 2019). Our results suggested that the nocturnal space use of Mexican spotted owls (e.g., indicative of foraging habitat) appears to align with characteristics that are consistent with the region's historical disturbance regimes. ...
July 2019
... Prescribed fires are planned, controlled fires that have multiple benefits for the ecosystem health, 1 hazard reduction, 2 and endangered wildlife protection. 3 Also, prescribed burning is a land management tool that can reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires. 4,5 However, both prescribed fires and wildfires emit significant amounts of pollutants such as particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM 2.5 ), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and nitrogen oxides (NO x ) into the troposphere, and these pollutants have adverse health impacts. ...
July 2019
... Land-use changes and short-rotation forestry over the last century have resulted in a deficit of these late-successional forests, and wildfire and insect disturbances associated with climate change may reduce intact primary forests even more [4]. There is an increasing need to understand the long-term impacts of old-growth preservation and restoration on timber production and biodiversity [5,6] as well as for carbon storage [7][8][9], especially regarding soil C [1]. ...
June 2018
... In contrast, frequent low-or intermediate-severity fire tends to primarily kill understory trees and promote the survival of large, fire-resistant pioneer tree species. Old-growth structure in frequent-fire regime forests consisted of shifting mosaics of structural patches in all developmental stages that collectively constitute a stand that may be considered mature or old-growth ( Fig. 4; Franklin et al., 2002;Spies et al., 2018b), or in a variety of patch sizes across a landscape (Kaufmann et al., 2007;North et al., 2009;Larson and Churchill, 2012). Abundance of shadetolerant trees and layered canopies was low except in less fire-prone topographic positions, and levels of large snags and dead downed wood were much lower than in less frequent fire regimes (Lorimer and White, 2003;Fraver and Palik, 2012;Hessburg et al., 2015). ...
January 2018
... In addition to these basic requirements, habitat suitability models intended to inform planning and permitting decisions on public lands must have a spatial resolution and accuracy that allows for their use at local scales (e.g., to inform decisions about the best placement of individual oil and gas wells to minimize loss of both occupied and suitable habitat for the species). Public land managers may be hesitant or unwilling to use models if they do not understand how they were developed, and as a result do not trust their quality (Addison et al., 2013;Sofaer et al., 2019;White et al., 2019). ...
April 2019
Journal of Forestry