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Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors related to the suppression of the Indigenous use of fire, aggressive fire suppression and, in some cases, changes in logging practices...
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California - one of the nation's most populous states - hosts extensive public lands, crown-jewel national parks, and diverse natural resources. Resource managers in federal, state, tribal, and local agencies face challenges due to environmental changes and extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, flood events, massive wildfires, and forest dieback. However, state-of-the-art research that could aid in the management of natural resources facing these challenges is typically slow to be applied, owing to limited time and capacity on the part of both researchers and managers. This project aims to accelerate the application of science to resource management by facilitating the translation and synthesis of...
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Tags: 2018,
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Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
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Science Tools for Managers,
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In 2017, California was experiencing its most severe drought in over a millennia. Low rainfall and record high temperatures resulted in increased tree mortality and complete forest diebacks across the West. Though land managers scrambled to respond, they lacked information needed to make informed decisions. Focusing on California’s central and southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, this project seeks to determine whether a key forest management practice – forest thinning via prescribed fire – can help forests better survive drought. Prescribed fire is commonly used in the western U.S. to remove potential wildfire fuel, such as small trees and shrubs. It is also thought that this act of selectively removing trees helps...
Categories: Project;
Types: Map Service,
OGC WFS Layer,
OGC WMS Layer,
OGC WMS Service;
Tags: 2015,
CASC,
Completed,
Drought,
Drought, All tags...
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather,
Fire,
Fire,
Forests,
Forests,
Landscapes,
Landscapes,
Other Landscapes,
Other Landscapes,
Plants,
Plants,
Projects by Region,
Southwest,
Southwest CASC,
Wildlife and Plants,
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Postfire Spatial Conifer Restoration Planning Tool (POSCRPT) R package (and web version) predicts the probability of post-fire conifer regeneration for fire data supplied by the user. The predictive model was fit using presence/absence data collected five years after wildfire, from 1,234 4.4m radius plots (60m2), spanning 19 wildfires in California. Please refer to Stewart et al. (2020) for more details. The poscrptR tool is designed to simplify the process of predicting post-fire conifer regeneration under different precipitation and seed production scenarios. The app was designed to use Rapid Assessment of Vegetative Condition (RAVG) data inputs. The RAVG website has both RdNBR and fire perimeter data sets...
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Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which...
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