Prescribed fire and mastication reduced bark-beetle-caused pine mortality

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Prescribed fire and mastication reduced bark-beetle-caused pine mortality

This study analyzes data from a mixed-severity fire in the northern range of coast redwood to create a model for predicting postfire response of four redwood community plants.Mastication, thinning, and prescribed fire can help shift fire-prone forests to a structure more resilient to fire and other disturbances. However, the ability to evaluate treatment effectiveness requires long-term monitoring of forest responses to disturbances and assessing changes in fuel loadings and structure. Researchers from Michigan State University and the USFS Fire Behavior Assessment Team remeasured a ponderosa pine forest 13 years after a combination of treatments were implemented: no treatment/control (C), mastication (M), mastication + burn (MB), and mastication + pull back of surface fuels + burn (MPB).

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Adaptive Strategies for Managing Bishop pine with Fire

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Adaptive Strategies for Managing Bishop pine with Fire

This study investigates Bishop pine's unique fire ecology, seed bank dynamics, and the impacts pine pitch canker infection has on stands.

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Heading fires consume more fuels than backing fires

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Heading fires consume more fuels than backing fires

Researchers from Michigan State University and the USFS Fire Behavior Assessment Team used 15 years of immediate pre- and post-fire fuel and wildfire behavior data to identify the role of fire advancement mode and pre-fire environmental drivers (e.g., topography, fire weather, and fuel loadings) on fuel consumption and fire effects in California mixed-conifer forests.

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Fire and fuels management in coast redwood forests

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Fire and fuels management in coast redwood forests

This report compiles research on fuel conditions, fire history, and fire effects data from contemporary wildfires to provide context for the future management of old growth coast redwood stands and restoration of old growth attributes in second growth forests. The report also investigates fire hazards present in redwood forests and their fire management implications.

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Post-fire Mastication Effects on Shrub Regrowth

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Post-fire Mastication Effects on Shrub Regrowth

In California’s dry mixed conifer forests, increasingly large high severity wildfires threaten to convert significant areas of forested land into shrub dominated landscapes in the absence of active reforestation, including control of competing vegetation. Previous studies have found that salvage logging and other methods used to prepare a site for reforestation may reduce shrub cover after wildfire. This study investigated the effect of masticated fuel depth on shrub growth where salvage logging and mastication followed high severity wildfire.

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Prescription Burning Reduces Alien Grasses in Native Grassland Restoration

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Prescription Burning Reduces Alien Grasses in Native Grassland Restoration

In Southern California, native bunchgrass communities dominated by Stipa pulchra are widely distributed in the state but often share dominance with non-native annual grasses. Restoration of these grasslands is focused on altering the balance of native to non-native grasses to favor the native perennial grasses. This study investigated the impact of burning on vegetation recovery.

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Status of Knowledge Synthesis for Desert Habitat Restoration and Post-Fire Rehabilitation

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Status of Knowledge Synthesis for Desert Habitat Restoration and Post-Fire Rehabilitation

Supported by the Clark County (Nevada) Desert Conservation Program and the California Fire Science Consortium, we completed a status of knowledge synthesis of restoration practices aimed at enhancing recovery of damaged habitats in the Mojave and western Sonoran Desert, some of the driest locations in North America.

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Long-Term Change in Desert Annuals during Restoration, Joshua Tree National Park

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Long-Term Change in Desert Annuals during Restoration, Joshua Tree National Park

It is not well understood whether desert plantings can facilitate recruitment of other natives (or mainly just non-natives), or whether facilitation changes through time as a restoration site matures. To address these uncertainties, we partnered with the National Park Service to study plant community change below planted perennials and in interspaces (areas between perennials) during 12 years (2009-2020) in Joshua Tree National Park, California, in the southern Mojave Desert.

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Tree recruitment over centuries: influences of climate and wildfire

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Tree recruitment over centuries: influences of climate and wildfire

This study uses tree cores gathered at three 4-hectare plots to make inferences about temporal aspects of tree recruitment in pine-dominated ecosystems of the California Sierra Nevada and the Sierra San Petro Martir in northwestern Mexico.

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Mega-disturbances & declining mature forest habitat

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Mega-disturbances & declining mature forest habitat

In this paper, the authors quantify change in the extent of mature conifer forests in the southern Sierra Nevada of California during 2011-2020, a decade and ecoregion characterized by compounding severe wildfires and drought follow prolonged fire exclusion.

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Techniques for restoring damaged Mojave and western Sonoran habitats, including those for threatened desert tortoises and Joshua trees.

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Techniques for restoring damaged Mojave and western Sonoran habitats, including those for threatened desert tortoises and Joshua trees.

Abella, S.R., K.H. Berry, and S. Ferrazzano. 2023. Techniques for restoring damaged Mojave and western Sonoran habitats, including those for threatened desert tortoises and Joshua trees. Desert Plants 38:4-52.

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Mountain quail: the lucky beneficiaries of high-severity fire

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Mountain quail: the lucky beneficiaries of high-severity fire

This study uses bio-acoustical monitoring to characterize the habitat of mountain quail in the California Sierra Nevada. Findings include that high severity wildfires may promote vegetation structures that are beneficial for mountain quail.

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Shaded fuel breaks create wildfire-resilient forest stands in the Sierra Nevada

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Shaded fuel breaks create wildfire-resilient forest stands in the Sierra Nevada

This study leveraged data collected from 20-year-old forest monitoring plots within fuel treatment units that captured a range of wildfire occurrence (i.e., not burned, burned once, or burned twice) following application of initial thinning treatments and prescribed fire.

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What Makes Wildfires Destructive in California? Study Points to Distance to Human Development and Fire Weather.

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What Makes Wildfires Destructive in California? Study Points to Distance to Human Development and Fire Weather.

A new paper by USGS and partners investigated why some California wildfires are destructive and others are not.

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