This paper offers a reconstruction of historic fire regimes and forest age structures in a mixed-‐ conifer forest in the Klamath Mountains of northern California, demonstrating the historic importance of temporal and spatial controls on fire in the area, and providing critical context for current restoration and management activities.
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North and Hurteau (2011) investigated the forest carbon tradeoffs of wildfire in treated and untreated mixed-‐conifer forests, as well as the carbon cost of implementing fuels reduction treatments.
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Here, Walter Johnson observes the effects of 20 years of grazing and browsing by cattle and deer on chaparral re-‐growth in the Sierra Nevada foothills
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Callaway and Davis were able "to quantify dynamic chaparral in vegetation patterns and the relative importance of fire, livestock grazing, topography, and substrate in grassland, coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and oak woodland distribution in central coastal California.”
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The authors surveyed administrators of regulatory and voluntary wildfire reduction programs in 25 US states to gain information on how they are organized, what they are trying to accomplish, what obstacles existed in their implementation, and how well they may be working.
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This paper uses tree ring data to develop climate and fire chronologies connections.
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Management strategies to reduce fire spread and severity typically involve targeted reduction of forest fuels through some combination of mechanical, hand, and/or burning treatments. A 2012 study by Safford et al. evaluates the effectiveness of such forest fuel treatments in mixed conifer and yellow pine forests in the California National Forests.
Read MoreIn the April issue of Ecological Applications, USGS scientists Kyle Merriam (currently with the USFS) and Dr. Jon Keeley and USFS colleague Dr. Jan Beyers report that an unintended result of these fuel modification programs can be the introduction and spread of nonnative invasive plant species.
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Two studies led by USGS and the Conservation Biology Institute have examined the factors affecting fuel break effectiveness in national forests.
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In a paper published in Fire Management Today, USGS scientist Jon Keeley coauthors a paper with colleagues from the California Chaparral Institute that analyzes weather and fuel factors in a case study of a critical part of the 2003 Cedar Fire perimeter in San Diego County.
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Resource managers in the 1950's believed that “brush removal” optimized the production value of acreage.
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Jason Greenlee and Jean Langenheim combined fire scar dating, historical documents and fire behavior modeling to reconstruct fire regimes for the major vegetation types around the Monterey Bay area from pre-‐11,000 BP to 1979.
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Keith Lombardo and his colleagues attempted to fill a void in the fire history knowledge for pre-Euro-American chaparral fire regimes by selecting an endemic tree commonly associated with chaparral at higher elevations.
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A 2013 study by Kane and others demonstrates that structural variation is significantly enhanced in the fire-frequent Sierra Nevada forests with the use of predominantly low- to moderate-severity fires.
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In a recent issue of the journal Ecological Applications, USGS scientist Dr. Matthew Brooks reports new information on temperature patterns during experimental fires, and the effects of these variable fire temperatures on annual plants in the Mojave Desert.
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It is concluded that there is a wealth of information on factors affecting fire size in southern California that make it unnecessary to base fire management in the region on questionable comparisons with Baja California.
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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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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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