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Wildfire can significantly alter the hydrologic response of a watershed to the extent that even modest rainstorms can produce dangerous flash floods and debris flows. The USGS conducts post-fire debris-flow hazard assessments for select fires in the Western U.S. We use geospatial data related to basin morphometry, burn severity, soil properties, and rainfall characteristics to estimate the probability and volume of debris flows that may occur in response to a design storm.
Mountain streams provide important habitats for many species, but their faunas are especially vulnerable to climate change because of ectothermic physiologies and movements that are constrained to linear networks that are easily fragmented. Effectively conserving biodiversity in these systems requires accurate downscaling of climatic trends to local habitat conditions, but downscaling is difficult in complex terrains given diverse microclimates and mediation of stream heat budgets by local conditions. We compiled a stream temperature database (n = 780) for a 2500-km river network in central Idaho to assess possible trends in summer temperatures and thermal habitat for two native salmonid species from 1993 to 2006....
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This dataset represents 25 parallel longitudinal profiles that were extracted from terrestrial lidar point clouds taken during six survey periods. The six lidar surveys were conducted between 7 October 2010 and 8 October 2013. Over that time a colluvial hollow eroded into a fluvial channel. The longitudinal profiles show the topography of the colluvial hollow for each survey period. The width of the original colluvial hollow was approximately 1.25 m, and a longitudinal profile was extracted every 5 cm for the entire length of the hollow, resulting in 25 parallel longitudinal profiles. These data can be used to observe the transition of the colluvial hollow to a fluvial channel and furthermore they show the development...
A warming climate, fire exclusion, and land cover changes are altering the conditions that produced historical fire regimes and facilitating increased recent wildfire activity in the northwestern United States. Understanding the impacts of changing fire regimes on forest recruitment and succession, species distributions, carbon cycling, and ecosystem services is critical, but challenging across broad spatial scales. One important and understudied aspect of fire regimes is the unburned area within fire perimeters; these areas can function as fire refugia across the landscape during and after wildfire by providing habitat and seed sources. With increasing fire activity, there is speculation that fire intensity and...
Wildfire refugia are forest patches that are minimally-impacted by fire and provide critical habitats for fire-sensitive species and seed sources for post-fire forest regeneration. Wildfire refugia are relatively understudied, particularly concerning the impacts of subsequent fires on existing refugia. We opportunistically re-visited 122 sites classified in 1994 for a prior fire refugia study, which were burned by two wildfires in 2012 in the Cascade mountains of central Washington, USA. We evaluated the fire effects for historically persistent fire refugia and compared them to the surrounding non-refugial forest matrix. Of 122 total refugial (43 plots) and non-refugial (79 plots) sites sampled following the 2012...
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Wildfire and fuel treatment locations for the USFWS Pacific Southwest Region (California, Nevada, Klamath Basin OR) extracted from the Fire Management Information System (FMIS) on October 23, 2015, for fiscal years 1980-2015.
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This data release includes time-series data from a monitoring site located in a small drainage basin in the Arroyo Seco watershed in Los Angeles County, CA, USA (N3788964 E389956, UTM Zone 11, NAD83). The site was established after the 2009 Station Fire and recorded a series debris flows in the first winter after the fire. The data include three types of time-series: (1) 1-minute time series of rainfall, soil water content, channel bed pore pressure and temperature, and flow stage recorded by radar and laser distance meters (ArroyoSecoContinuous.csv); (2) 10-Hz time series of flow stage recorded by the laser distance meter during rain storms (ArroyoSecoStormLaser.csv), and (3) 2-second time series of rainfall and...
Accelerating disturbance activity under a warming climate increases the potential for multiple disturbances to overlap and produce compound effects that erode ecosystem resilience — the capacity to experience disturbance without transitioning to an alternative state. A key concern is the potential for amplifying or attenuating feedbacks via interactions among successive, linked disturbance events. Following severe wildfires, fuel limitation is a negative feedback that may reduce the likelihood of subsequent fire. However, the duration of, and pre-fire vegetation effects on fuel limitation remain uncertain. To address this knowledge gap, we characterized fuel profiles over a 35-year post-fire chronosequence in California...
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This product releases data on soil physical and hydraulic properties in the area affected by the 2011 Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico, USA. Soil samples were collected in the summer of 2015 to assess the state of the watershed following the 2011 wildfire. Data include soil-hydraulic properties of field-saturated hydraulic conductivity and sorptivity from tension infiltrometer measurements on soil cores. Soil physical properties include bulk density, as-sampled volumetric soil-water content, and saturated volumetric soil-water content for 6-cm length soil cores. Soil properties of soil-particle size, bulk density, and soil organic matter content from loss on ignition for soil core splits of 0-1. 1-3, and 3-6 cm depth....
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The focus of the study, associated with these data, is a 540-km2 area at the low-elevation northern end of the 1460-km2 Milford Flat Fire in west-central Utah, and includes burned and adjacent unburned areas. Uncontrolled wildfire in arid and semiarid ecosystems has become an increasing concern in recent decades. Active rehabilitation of fire-affected areas is often quickly initiated to minimize long-term ecosystem damage. However, the complex soil-geomorphic-vegetation patterns and low and variable moisture conditions in these regions makes restoration challenging. To further inform these post-fire management decisions, we present results from 5-years of vegetation and sediment flux monitoring following the Milford...
Abstract (from http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3955/046.089.0305): It is hypothesized that climate impacts forest mosaics through dynamic ecological processes such as wildfires. However, climate-fire research has primarily focused on understanding drivers of fire frequency and area burned, largely due to scale mismatches and limited data availability. Recent datasets, however, allow for the investigation of climate influences on ecological patch metrics across broad regions independent of area burned and at finer scale. One area of particular interest is the distribution of fire refugia within wildfire perimeters. Although much recent research emphasis has been placed on high-severity patches within wildfires,...
We examined the effects of fire disturbance on permafrost degradation and thaw settlement across a series of wildfires (from ~1930 to 2010) in the forested areas of collapse-scar bog complexes in the Tanana Flats lowland of interior Alaska. Field measurements were combined with numerical modeling of soil thermal dynamics to assess the roles of fire severity and climate history in postfire permafrost dynamics. Field-based calculations of potential thaw settlement following the loss of remaining ice-rich permafrost averaged 0.6 m. This subsidence would cause the surface elevations of forests to drop on average 0.1 m below the surface water level of adjacent collapse-scar features. Up to 0.5 m of thaw settlement was...
Volumes of eroded sediment after wildfires vary substantially throughout different geologic terrains across the western United States. These volumes are difficult to compare because they represent the response to rainstorms and runoff with different characteristics. However, by measuring the erosion response as the erodibility efficiency of water to detach and transport sediment on hillslopes and in channels, the erosion response from different geologic terrains can be compared. Specifically, the erodibility efficiency is the percentage of the total available stream power expended to detach, remobilize, or transport a mass of sediment. Erodibility efficiencies were calculated for the (i) initial detachment, and...
Within the state of Oregon, USA, there is considerable interest in the possibility of converting forest biomass to energy. A number of studies have assessed the technical feasibility of forest biomass energy, but few have focused on social aspects, an important consideration in projects involving public forests. This study explores the social context of converting forest biomass to energy, using qualitative research methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty individuals representing nine different stakeholder groups. Information gained through interviews was used to understand stakeholder views on forest biomass energy, including their perspectives on potential barriers and opportunities in Oregon....
Debris flows generated during rain storms on recently burned areas have destroyed lives and property throughout the Western U.S. Field evidence indicate that unlike landslide-triggered debris flows, these events have no identifiable initiation source and can occur with little or no antecedent moisture. Using rain gage and response data from five fires in Colorado and southern California, we document the rainfall conditions that have triggered post-fire debris flows and develop empirical rainfall intensity?duration thresholds for the occurrence of debris flows and floods following wildfires in these settings. This information can provide guidance for warning systems and planning for emergency response in similar...
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Indices of habitat suitability and animal abundance provide useful proxy-based measures adaptive management (Coates et al. 2015a). Doherty et al. (in review) derived a range-wide population index model for sage-grouse using such indices that incorporated sage-grouse habitat suitability generated from Random Forest models (Evans et al. 2011), and spatially explicit abundance measures based on fixed kernel density functions informed by distributions of lek locations (lek locations defined by Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, see Coates et al. 2015b). The kernels were generated using two bandwidth distances representing the majority of breeding habitat in relation to leks (6.4 km) and seasonal movements...
Two decades of uncharacteristically severe wildfires have caused government and private land managers to actively reduce hazardous fuels to lessen wildfire severity in western forests, including riparian areas. Because riparian fuel treatments are a fairly new management strategy, we set out to document their frequency and extent on federal lands in the western U.S. Seventy-four USDA Forest Service Fire Management Officers (FMOs) in 11 states were interviewed to collect information on the number and characteristics of riparian fuel reduction treatments in their management district. Just under half of the FMOs surveyed (43%) indicated that they were conducting fuel reduction treatments in riparian areas. The primary...
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***This data set is superseded by Welty, J.L., and Jeffries, M.I., 2020, Combined wildfire datasets for the United States and certain territories, 1878-2019: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Z2VVRT.*** The increase in wildfires, particularly in the western U.S., represents one of the greatest threats to multiple native ecosystems. Despite this threat, there is currently no central repository to store both past and current wildfire perimeter data. Currently, wildfire boundaries can only be found in disparate local or national datasets. These datasets are generally restricted to specific locations, fire sizes, or time periods. Our first objective was to create a comprehensive national...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425716303261): Wildfires shape the distribution and structure of vegetation across the inland northwestern United States. However, fire activity is expected to increase given the current rate of climate change, with uncertain outcomes. A fire impact that has not been widely addressed is the development of unburned islands; areas within the fire perimeter that do not burn. These areas function as critical ecological refugia for biota during or following wildfires, but they have been largely ignored in methodological studies of remote sensing assessing fire severity under the assumption that they will be detected by algorithms for delineating fire...
We examined the effects of fire disturbance on permafrost degradation and thaw settlement across a series of wildfires (from ~1930 to 2010) in the forested areas of collapse-scar bog complexes in the Tanana Flats lowland of interior Alaska. Field measurements were combined with numerical modeling of soil thermal dynamics to assess the roles of fire severity and climate history in postfire permafrost dynamics. Field-based calculations of potential thaw settlement following the loss of remaining ice-rich permafrost averaged 0.6 m. This subsidence would cause the surface elevations of forests to drop on average 0.1 m below the surface water level of adjacent collapse-scar features. Up to 0.5 m of thaw settlement was...
map background search result map search result map Milford Flat Fire—Data Region 8 FMIS Wildfire and Fuel Treatment Locations 1980-2015 Great Basin Sage-Grouse Concentration Areas Soil Physical and Hydraulic Properties in the Area Affected by the 2011 Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico Post-wildfire debris-flow monitoring data, Arroyo Seco, 2009 Station Fire, Los Angeles County, California, November 2009 to March 2010. Combined wildfire dataset for the United States and certain territories, 1870-2015 Fourmile Canyon Wildfire Longitudinal Profile Data Fourmile Canyon Wildfire Longitudinal Profile Data Milford Flat Fire—Data Soil Physical and Hydraulic Properties in the Area Affected by the 2011 Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico Great Basin Sage-Grouse Concentration Areas Combined wildfire dataset for the United States and certain territories, 1870-2015 Region 8 FMIS Wildfire and Fuel Treatment Locations 1980-2015