Southwest Fire Season 2019 Overview and 2020 Outlook

Date: April 29, 2020 11am AZ/12pm MDT Presenters: Michael Lynch and Zander Evans, Forest Stewards Guild and Rich Naden, Fire Weather Meteorologist, Southwest Coordination Center The purpose of this webinar is to review 2019 fires and look ahead toward conditions for 2020. Dr. Zander Evans will present an overview of the largest fires in the …

Evaluating Change in Bird Communities from Wildfire in the Arizona Sky Islands

Date: June 17, 11am AZ/12pm MDT Presenter:  Jamie Sanderlin, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station The avifauna within the Sky Islands of southeastern Arizona includes species found nowhere else in the United States, in part due to the availability of diverse habitats created by the mixing of Madrean and Cordilleran ecosystems. Neotropical migratory bird species …

December 14, 2011: Carbon and water balances of southwestern ponderosa pine forests

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 …

June 22, 2011: Fire history and age structure patterns at landscape scales

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 …

Can landscape fuel treatments enhance both protection and resource management objectives?

Date: September 14, 2021 11am AZ/12pm MDTPresenter: Kevin Vogler, Pyrologix LLC, Missoula Montana Land management agencies in the U.S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture can potentially accomplish ecological resource management objectives using unplanned wildfires, but only if such fires do not otherwise threaten to damage valuable resources and assets. Landscape-scale fuel treatments have been proposed …

Sonoran desert view showing saguaro cactus surrounded by tall buffelgrass

Monitoring and Removal of Invasive Grasses for Restoration of Dry Desert Systems

IN A NUTSHELLA panel of researchers and managers discusses the impact of non-native invasive grasses on dry desert systems and various methods to remove, monitor, or slow their spread. The fire regime of dry desert systems, such as the Sonoran, historically consisted of infrequent, low intensity, size-limited fires. Native grasses and other vegetation, which grow …

2020 SW Wildfire Season Overview

by M. Lynch and A. Evans. In 2020, wildfire burned 1,068,373 acres in the Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico), which is greater than the average number of acres burned annually in these two states over the previous ten-year period.” Arizona had significantly more wildfire (929,522 acres) than its ten-year average (305,623 acres), while New Mexico …

Burning in the Black Range- Using prescribed fire on the Gila National Forest

A brief look at how the Black Range of the Gila National Forest goes about putting down thousands of acres of prescribed fire. See how the District works in a collaborative and productive manner while working within the multiple-use framework to include grazing, wildlife, recreation, and community outreach. Supported by science, the agency looks to …

March 17, 2016: Persistence and fire regimes of oak shrubfields suggest increasing dominance with climate change

Presenter: Chris Guiterman, University of Arizona PhD Candidate A number of recent studies in the Southwest region have documented abrupt transitions of conifer-dominated forests to shrubfields following high-severity fire. Little is known about the long-term ecosystem dynamics of these stands, including their successional trajectories and interactions with fire. I will present dendroecological analyses of five of …

Fire-weather Drivers of Severity and Spread: Example from Grand Canyon

Presenter: Stephanie Mueller, Northern Arizona UniversityDate: July 29, 2021 11am AZ / 12pm MDT Fire is an essential component in restoring and maintaining a healthy forest. However, historic land use and decades of fire suppression has excluded fire from millions of forested hectares across much of the western United States, including the Grand Canyon National …