In Diversity and Distributions, the authors found that determining the factors responsible for community-scale plant diversity in California shrublands is a multifaceted problem.
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In central coastal California, a complex mosaic of vegetation types appears to be largely unrelated to substrate and more strongly determined by disturbance history, in particular human induced changes in fire frequency.
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In response to a recent criticism of the practice of prescription burning published in Trends in Plant Science, USGS scientist Jon Keeley and colleagues from Spain, South Africa and Australia contend that when applied within the context of a landscape’s natural fire regime, prescribed burning remains a viable treatment to manage native plant ecosystems.
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Models of fisher habitat selection and metapopulation dynamics in the southern Sierra Nevada suggest the negative effects of fuel treatments on fisher habitat suitability and population size are generally smaller than the long-‐term positive effects of fuel treatments that reduce wildfire risk and severity.
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With a mark-recapture study, individual walking sticks were observed to travel up to only 8m per week, validating the conclusion that the post-burn population was indeed a persistent population, rather than an immigrant one.
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A wildfire at Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest (BMEF) in northern California provided a rare opportunity to compare fire behavior and effects in treated and untreated ponderosa pine forests.
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Sudden oak death (SOD), a forest disease caused by the pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, is a good example of a recently introduced disease with unknown implications for forest health and future disturbances. In the dry tanoak forests of northern California, the potential relationships between SOD and fire are of particular concern.
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A recent publication in BioScience by USGS, in collaboration with other scientists from North America, Australia, and South Africa, presents a multi-phase model describing the interrelationships between plant invaders and fire regimes.
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A study published in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry by scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno evaluated the effects of cut-‐to-‐ length harvesting with slash chipping on dead and downed surface fuels in a mixed conifer stand in California’s Lake Tahoe Basin.
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An increase in the frequency and spatial extent of stand-replacing fires in western North America has prompted concern for California spotted owls and other sensitive species associated with late-successional forests.
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Fire and invasive species may cause changes in biological, chemical, and physical properties of desert soils. Although soil may recover from the impacts of fire during succession, these changes are permanent under persistent invasive species.
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A century of fire exclusion in the western United States has altered oak woodland landscapes, resulting in severe compositional and structural changes that influence species diversity and distribution, fuel loading, and fire behavior and effects.
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Invasions of nonnative Tamarix spp. into desert riparian ecosystems in the southwestern U.S. and its replacement of native vegetation raises questions about potential shifts in fuel characteristics and fire behavior.
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McCaffrey (2004) investigated what types of information are most useful to increase public support concerning defensible space, prescribed burning, and thinning activities.
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This review paper describes geographical variation of mixed severity fire regimes in Pacific temperate forests and summarizes known information about fire effects and ecology in relation to the vegetation types characterized by such regimes.
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In a recent USFS publication, USGS scientist Dr. Jon Keeley led a team of scientists from various agencies and academic institutions in developing a framework that will inform fire management of ecosystems.
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There appears to be no indication that the frequency and severity of large fires have changed from historical fire regimes on landscapes as diverse as Rocky Mountain conifer forests and southern California chaparral.
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The National Fire and Fire Surrogates (FFS) study was designed to evaluate differences among alternative fuels reduction treatments in seasonally dry forests throughout the country, and to test the assumption that mechanical treatments might be used to accomplish the same stand structure and ecological goals as prescribed fire.
Read MorePost-fire fundamentals of the recovery process in California chaparral and sage scrub.
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Read MoreSatellite imagery has potential for assessing fire severity across broad landscapes and diverse vegetation types.
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The California Fire Science Consortium is divided into 4 geographic regions and 1 wildland-urban interface (WUI) team. Statewide coordination of this program is based at UC Berkeley.
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This regional Fire Science Exchange is one of 15 regional fire science exchanges.
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