November 2012: New Mexico Rx Fire Council

We hosted a one day joint meeting and field trip for the New Mexico Prescribed Fire Council and the New Mexico Interagency Coordinating Group to help bridge the role of the two groups and create an opportunity for sharing of information and building contacts. On the field trip, we took the group to the Chupadera …

October 24, 2012: Whitewater-Baldy Complex

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 …

March 2012: FRCC Workshop – (Albuquerque, NM and Flagstaff, AZ)

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 …

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 …

March 18, 2012: Fire Regime Condition Class Mapping Tool

Presenters: Steve Barrett & Jeff Jones (NIFTT University of Idaho) The FRCC Mapping Tool quantifies the departure of vegetation conditions and fire regimes from a set of reference conditions representing the historical range of variation. The tool, which operates from an ArcGIS platform, derives several metrics of departure (e.g., vegetation composition and structure, fire severity, …

March 2010: Ecological Impact of Mastication

Mike Battaglia (USFS RMRS) presented results from the Joint Fire Science Project on the Ecological Impact of Mastication. Mike reported on the impact of mastication on the chemical and physical conditions of the forest floor, vegetation regrowth, and fuel development. The study included 18 sites across four ecosystems of the southern Rocky Mountains and the …

June 2011: Santa Fe Watershed Forum and Field Trip

A large and diverse group of collaborators has successfully initiated restoration of ponderosa pine forests in the Santa Fe municipal watershed, which provides up to 50% of Santa Fe’s water. Follow-up prescribed fire treatments within sight of the state capital building have been successful in part due to continuing outreach to maintain high levels of …

May 18, 2011: Fuels Treatment Practices for Mixed Conifer Forests in the Southwest

Presenter: Alexander Evans (Forest Guild) The webinar covered the guide’s definition of mixed conifer, past land use and management activities, fire regimes and historic conditions, and impact of altered fire regimes in mixed conifer forests of the southwest. Since Euro-American settlement, many mixed conifer forests have become more homogeneous and can therefore facilitate larger, higher-severity …

April 20, 2011: Southwest Climate Change Initiative

Marcos Robles of the The Nature Conservancy presented information from the Southwest Climate Change Initiative. The Initiative is a collaborative effort started by The Nature Conservancy in 2008 to provide climate science information to natural resource managers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah so that they can begin responding to climate change. First, Marcos …

March 2011: Southwest Interagency Fuels Workshop

Facilitated discussions, presentations, and workshops on restoration and fuels treatments in southwestern vegetation types. Download Agenda/Schedule here Download presentations here: Near Misses…   – Alex Viktora Fuels Management… – Robin Wills