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Jon Keeley

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Preventing Extreme Fire Events by Learning from History: The Effects of Wind, Temperature, and Drought Extremes on Fire Activity
The 2017 fire season in California was highly unusual with its late seasonal timing, the areal extent it burned, and its devastation to communities. These fires were associated with extreme winds and were potentially also influenced by unusually dry conditions during several years leading up to the 2017 events. This fire season brought additional attention and emphasized the vital need for managers in the western U.S. to have access to scientific information on when and where to expect dangerous fire events. Understanding the multiple factors that cause extreme wildfire events is critical to short and long-term forecasting and planning. Seasonal climate measures such as temperature and precipitation are commonly...
The fire regime is a central framing concept in wildfire science and ecology and describes how a range of wildfire characteristics vary geographically over time. Understanding and mapping fire regimes is important for guiding appropriate management and risk reduction strategies and for informing research on drivers of global change and altered fire patterns. Most efforts to spatially delineate fire regimes have been conducted by identifying natural groupings of fire parameters based on available historical fire data. This can result in classes with similar fire characteristics but wide differences in ecosystem types. We took a different approach and defined fire regime ecoregions for California to better align with...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Understanding Fire-caused Vegetation Type Conversion in Southwestern Conifer Forests under Current and Future Climate Conditions
Fire size, frequency, overall area burned, and severity are increasing across many vegetation types in the southwestern U.S. In many cases, large contiguous areas are burning repeatedly at high severity, triggering vegetation type conversions (VTC), where once-dominant coniferous forests fail to return to their pre-fire state, often transitioning to shrub- or grass-dominated systems. Loss of these forests affects biodiversity, ecosystem services, and culturally-valued resources. The science and management communities, however, currently lack a comprehensive understanding of VTC in this region. This study will help identify and fill sizable research gaps by synthesizing manager observations and the current scientific...
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