An article provides an overview of key factors, concepts and tools to understand the ecological resistance to biological invasion and resilience to fire of desert shrublands of North America.
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In a study of three prescribed fires in a mixed-‐ conifer forest at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, researchers found that the predicted probability of sugar pine survival was 60% for raked trees compared to 7% for un-‐raked trees when the total fuel depth was greater than 30cm.
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Through modeling, field experiments, and case studies, the author demonstrated that home ignitability is largely dependent on a structure’s exterior materials and design combined with its exposure to flames and firebrands.
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Three complementary studies reviewed here examine how forest structure and fire regimes have varied spatially and temporally in the Lake Tahoe Basin, CA and NV.
Read MoreThis paper examines the social, political, and ecological needs and challenges associated with the use of prescribed fire as a management tool in North America.
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This study was the first to sample early recolonization after fire at the scale of the large wildfires that account for the majority of area burned in southern California.
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Vegetation mosaics in coastal California are dynamic. Post-‐fire shifts in plant community distributions can be explained by considering the dominant species’ life history characteristics, dispersal ability, fire severity, land use history, and site characteristics.
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This study used highly detailed demographic data to investigate vegetation recovery during the first five years after fire in southern California chaparral and sage scrub.
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This paper explored post-fire effects on small mammals in burned chaparral ecosystems from the 2003 Cedar fire. Their results “highlight the dramatic changes in rodent community composition and species abundance caused by fire in chaparral” and that “recovery is largely driven by previously known relationships between small mammals and habitat structure”.
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Previous researchers have advocated that to obtain maximum diversity one must position rectangular plots along the environmental gradient that generates the highest species turnover. In the ecosystems studied here there was no evidence of consistent trends along gradients either perpendicular or parallel to the slope contour.
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Research by USGS scientist Dr. Jon Keeley and colleagues published recently in Ecology examined the utility of plant functional traits for global prediction in crown-fire ecosystems.
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Three sites of "blackbrush vegetation type" were compared under unburned and burned (6–14 years postfire) sites for a variety of characteristics in the Mojave Desert.
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In the 1940's California Division of Forestry (CDF) rangeland managers believed that the grazing capacity of the California foothills had decreased due to weedy herbs and invading chaparral. The most effective methods were explored to convert chaparral to rangeland.
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Using GIS fire history data, 1930-‐1934 VTM maps and modern vegetation maps, four experimental sites with short fire return intervals (<6 years) were paired to four control sites with similar vegetation, slope, aspect and elevation but with longer fire intervals (>12 years).
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Janet Franklin and colleagues used LANDIS, a landscape disturbance and succession model to investigate how short, moderate and long fire return intervals (FRI's) in southern California affect persistence of different shrub life histories.
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In this study, two atmosphere-‐ocean general circulation models to explore shifts in Santa Ana occurrences.
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In some ecosystems, high-severity regimes are appropriate, but climate change may modify these fire regimes and ecosystems as well. Some undesirable impacts may be avoided or reduced through global strategies, as well as distinct strategies based on a forest’s historical fire regime.
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This paper analyzed patterns of lightning and human caused fires for a 10 year period in California.
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In 2003, Southern California experienced several large fires that burned thousands of hectares of wildlife habitats and conserved lands. A USGS study published in the Journal of Herpetology reports that after the fires, burned chaparral and coastal sage scrub (CSS) plots lost herpetological diversity and displayed a significant shift in overall community structure.
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A study demonstrates some critically important flaws in some of the published studies and suggests approaches for increasing the credibility of studies using historical VTM data.
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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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