Forest fuel treatments are used by managers for ecological restoration and reducing fire hazard. Due to past management decisions and long-term fire exclusion, forests are more dense and are susceptible to severe wildfires. Fuel treatments aim to reduce the intensity and size of wildfires, increase species diversity, and restore forests to their historical condition. Read …
Date: March 1, 2017, 12pm MST Presenter: Jonathan Coop and Pat Magee Mastication and hand-thinning treatments are increasingly utilized by land managers as a means of reducing tree cover for fire hazard mitigation and other habitat objectives in piñon-juniper (P-J) woodlands. However, the effects of these treatments on ecological processes including fire, and on a wide …
This factsheet is a result of graduate research and has not been peer reviewed beyond graduate committee members. by Chris Ives Increasingly large, frequent, and severe fires across the western United States are creating difficult restoration challenges for land managers. Despite the wide use of current fire restoration techniques, many studies have shown little to …
Read more “Fire moss as a tool for post-wildfire ecosystem restoration”
Date: January 18, 2017, 12pm MST Presenter: Marin Chambers, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, CSU The past two decades have witnessed fires of increased severity in southern Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine – dominated forests. Marin will discuss results from an ongoing project that is characterizing post-fire conifer regeneration in severely burned patches, and how regeneration characteristics are governed …
Presenter: Robin Innes, Ecologist Fire Effects Information System (FEIS, www.feis-crs.org/feis/) staff will introduce new two fire regime products-Fire Regime Reports and Fire Regime Syntheses-and demonstrate FEIS’s new search functions to inform fire management planning and decision-making in the Southwest and Southern Rockies regions. Fire Regime Reports summarize information from thousands of LANDFIRE Biophysical Settings models, which …
Presenter: Zander Evans, Forest Guild and Brent Wachter, National Weather Service Please join us for a webinar to review last year’s fires and look ahead toward conditions for this year. Dr. Zander Evans will present an overview of the 12 largest fires in the Southwest during 2015. He will share summaries of forest types and burn …
Read more “May 18, 2016: Southwest Fire Season: 2015 Overview and 2016 Outlook- May 2016”
Presenter: Chris Guiterman, University of Arizona PhD Candidate A number of recent studies in the Southwest region have documented abrupt transitions of conifer-dominated forests to shrubfields following high-severity fire. Little is known about the long-term ecosystem dynamics of these stands, including their successional trajectories and interactions with fire. I will present dendroecological analyses of five of …
Date: Wednesday January 20, 2016 12pm Mountain Presenter: Randy Swaty, The Nature Conservancy LANDFIRE Team All ecosystems are dynamic, changing due to growth, succession and disturbances. Modeling large landscapes in the United States requires the collective knowledge of experienced and knowledgeable vegetation and fire experts. In collaboration with hundreds of colleagues, LANDFIRE produced more than 1,000 state-and-transitions …
Read more “January 20, 2016: Biophysical Settings Review: What it is. How it works. Why it matters”
Presenter: Steve Barrett & Kathy Schon (NIFTT University of Idaho) Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC) is an interagency, standardized tool for determining the degree of departure from reference condition vegetation structure and composition and fire regimes. FRCC metrics can help guide management objectives and set priorities for treatments. This webinar introduces the participant to the theories …
Read more “June 20, 2012: Fire Regime Condition Class Concepts”
This will be a panel presentation followed by a question/answer and discussion, approximately 90 minutes in length Assessing and analyzing mixed conifer spatial patterns of northern Arizona (Kyle Rodman) Effects of tree cutting and fire on understory vegetation in mixed conifer forests (Judy Springer) Treatement effectiveness of mixed conifer treatments in the Wallow Fire (Amy Waltz) Overview …
Read more “November 10, 2015: Mixed Conifer Forest Ecology: Emerging Science”