April 26, 2017: Southwest Fire Season 2016 Overview and 2017 Outlook

Date: Wednesday April 26, 2017 12pm MDT (11am AZ) Presenter: Zander Evans, Forest Stewards Guild and Chuck Maxwell, Predictive Services Meteorologist, Southwest Coordination Center Please join us for a webinar to review last year’s fires and look ahead toward conditions for this year. Dr. Zander Evans will present an overview of the 12 largest fires in the …

April 12, 2017: Efficacy of resource objective wildfires for restoring ponderosa pine ecosystems in N. Arizona

Efficacy of resource objective wildfires for restoring ponderosa pine ecosystems in northern Arizona Date: April 12, 2017 11am AZ/12pm MDT Presenter: David Huffman, Ecological Restoration Institute, Northern Arizona University Historical interruption of frequent surface fire regimes and decades of fire exclusion have resulted in degraded ecological conditions in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests of the American …

What is a forest fuel treatment?

Forest fuel treatments are used by managers for ecological restoration and reducing fire hazard. Due to past management decisions and long-term fire exclusion, forests are more dense and are susceptible to severe wildfires. Fuel treatments aim to reduce the intensity and size of wildfires, increase species diversity, and restore forests to their historical condition. Read …

March 1, 2017: Fuels treatments and ecological values in piñon-juniper woodlands: Vegetation, birds, and modeled fire behavior

Date: March 1, 2017, 12pm MST Presenter: Jonathan Coop and Pat Magee Mastication and hand-thinning treatments are increasingly utilized by land managers as a means of reducing tree cover for fire hazard mitigation and other habitat objectives in piñon-juniper (P-J) woodlands. However, the effects of these treatments on ecological processes including fire, and on a wide …

Megan Poling research

August 24, 2016: Increasing trends in high severity fire in the southwestern USA from 1984-2013

Presenter: Megan Poling, PhD Student, Northern Arizona University In the last three decades nearly 5 million hectares have burned in all vegetation types in the Southwest and the largest fires in documented history have occurred in the past two decades. However, trends in severity, or how fires are burning have not been well documented in forest …

High Severity Fire: Response and Uncertainty

Do high severity burns lead to conversion to new forest types or a shift from forests to shrublands or grasslands? How do wildlife respond to changing habitats? And, finally, what do these changes tell us about how these ecosystems will respond to climate change? We visited the sites of the 2000 Pumpkin Fire and 2003 Aspen Fire, and talked to researchers who have been studying how forests and wildlife respond to high severity burns. View the YouTube video here.


May 18, 2016: Finding the Best Available Science on Fire Effects and Fire Regimes in Southwestern and Southern Rocky Mountains Ecosystems

Presenter: Robin Innes, Ecologist Fire Effects Information System (FEIS, www.feis-crs.org/feis/) staff will introduce new two fire regime products-Fire Regime Reports and Fire Regime Syntheses-and demonstrate FEIS’s new search functions to inform fire management planning and decision-making in the Southwest and Southern Rockies regions. Fire Regime Reports summarize information from thousands of LANDFIRE Biophysical Settings models, which …

May 18, 2016: Southwest Fire Season: 2015 Overview and 2016 Outlook- May 2016

Presenter: Zander Evans, Forest Guild and Brent Wachter, National Weather Service Please join us for a webinar to review last year’s fires and look ahead toward conditions for this year. Dr. Zander Evans will present an overview of the 12 largest fires in the Southwest during 2015. He will share summaries of forest types and burn …

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 …