Presenter: Pete Fulè, Professor, Northern Arizona University
Under current conditions, large, severe wildfires are a fact of life in southwestern ponderosa pine forests. What will burned systems look like over the coming decades under warming climate? Do management treatments make a lasting difference or will climate override their effects? We applied the relatively new feature of the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) called Climate-FVS, which modifies the widely used FVS model to make it simulate effects of climate change. The short answer: climate change has major effects on our test site, the Rodeo-Chediski fire on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. At the severe end of the climate scale, forests are nearly eliminated. But under more moderate climate change scenarios, management intervention makes a big difference. The strengths and weaknesses of building climate change into forest modeling are important to understand for making informed decisions.
Authors: Alicia Azpeleta Tarancón, Peter Fulé, Kristen Shive, Carolyn Hull Sieg, Andrew Sánchez Meador, Barbara Strom
Support: Joint Fire Science Program 11-1-1-27, assistance from Ecological Restoration Institute and Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.
