Two important questions about fire severity that are investigated are: to what extent can fire severity be measured by remote sensing indices, and do fire severity measurements predict ecosystem responses in vegetation recovery.
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According to a recent statewide FRID (fire return interval departure) analysis for USFS and some NPS lands, there are two distinct California fire regimes.
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Temporal and spatial patterns of burning can affect the invasion risk and prevalence of alien plants in California as explained in a book chapter in The Landscape Ecology of Fire.
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In a comparative study of fire sizes north and south of the U.S./Mexican border Minnich (1983) demonstrated differences during a nine year period in non-‐forested landscapes that included chaparral, sage scrub and annual grassland.
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In the April issue of Conservation Biology, Keeley considers the impact of six fire management practices on alien invasions: fire suppression, forest fuel reduction, prescription burning in crown fire ecosystems, fuel breaks, targeting noxious aliens, and postfire rehabilitation.
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USGS research botanist Matt Brooks and National Wildlife Refuges invasive species coordinator Michael Lusk have compiled a handbook titled Fire Management and Invasive Plants, with support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Refuge System, USGS and the Joint Fire Science Program.
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This paper evaluated the current usage of the terms "fire frequency" and "fire intensity" and agrees the terminology requires clarification but advocates retention of these terms.
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Cook used the 1953 wildfire in Berkeley, CAas an opportunity to research the effects of fire on rodent populations in California grasslands and “brushlands.”
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USGS Western Ecological Research Center publication brief.
These in-depth studies of the ecological role of fire and management implications cover some of the most critical regions in the state.
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Dendrochronology and other methods were used to reconstruct the fire history from 1500 through 2006 in the vicinity of Mt. Irish.
Read MoreThese fire-prone environments pose a challenge to resource managers concerned with maintaining sustainable populations of this uniquely Californian pine species.
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Mastication is an increasingly popular fuels treatment, particularly in densely populated or otherwise complex areas where prescribed fire would be difficult or impossible to implement.
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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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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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