The Horseshoe Two Fire began on May 8, 2011 on the east side of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona and burned northeast into the Chiricahua National Monument. The topics covered on this field trip included landscape scale fire management, fire effects, operations, impacts on wildlife, post-fire rehabilitation efforts, and treatment effectiveness. Day one covered …
We hosted a one day field trip to explore New Mexico’s largest wildfire*, the Whitewater Baldy Complex, that burned 297,845 acres (465 square miles) on the Gila National Forest during the extremely dry and windy spring of 2012. The tour discussed the fire regimes of the fuel types that burned, the interaction of past fires …
Presenter: Yeon-Su Kim (Northern Arizona University) and Diane Vosick (Ecological Restoration Institute) What are the economic values of landscape-level ecological restoration and hazardous fuel treatments? The Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University (ERI) assembled a team of wildland fire economists to conduct a rapid evidence-based assessment, as well as to design a timely and efficient …
A one day tour of the Track Fire near Raton, New Mexico. The fire started on June 12, 2012 from ATV Carbon exhaust flakes. It burned New Mexico and Colorado public and private land requiring interstate logistics. Some burned areas received cooperative post-fire watershed rehabilitation treatments from the City of Raton, the states of New …
Presenter: Vita Wright (Northern Rockies Fire Science Network) Recent science communication studies of the federal fire management community suggest managers access research via informal information networks, and that these networks vary by both agency and position. We used a phone survey to understand the informal science communication networks of fire professionals in two of the …
Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC) assessments have been widely used for evaluating ecosystem status in many areas of the U.S. FRCC employs state-and-transition modeling to describe historical vegetation and fire regimes, which provides reference information related to landscape fire frequency, severity, and vegetation composition. Similarity indexing is used to compare historical versus current vegetation and …
Read more “March 2012: FRCC Workshop – (Albuquerque, NM and Flagstaff, AZ)”
The purpose of this workshop/webinar hybrid is to develop a working knowledge of computer models and their applications as needed to provide vegetation and fuels assessment input for unit and project-level planning. Fuels specialists in particular need tools that will help them assess existing and future vegetation conditions and the impact of treatments on fire …
Read more “January-March 2012: Computer Modeling for Fuels Specialists”
Presenter: Jose Iniguez (USFS RMRS) Top-down regional climate patterns result in high spatial fire synchrony among Southwest forests. At landscape scales, however bottom-up (topography) patterns are also important in determining fire history and tree age structure variability. The distinct fire histories from these two study areas provided natural age structure experiments that indicated tree age …
Read more “June 22, 2011: Fire history and age structure patterns at landscape scales”
Presenter: Eva Strand & Josh Hyde (NIFTT University of Idaho) WFAT provides an interface between ArcMap, FlamMap 5, and the First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM), combining their strengths into a spatial fire behavior and fire effects analysis tool in GIS. In the webinar, you will learn how to use WFAT to locate potential fuel …
In this webinar Dr. Thomas Kolb summarized the key findings of a six-year study of impacts of intense fire and fuel-reduction thinning on the carbon and water balances of ponderosa pine forests in Arizona. The results should be of interest to fire and forest managers and climate change scientists who want more information about impacts …
Read more “December 14, 2011: Carbon and water balances of southwestern ponderosa pine forests”