Date: December 15, 2020 12pm Mountain Time The East Jemez Landscape Futures (EJLF) project is a collaborative, landscape-scale approach to help guide future planning and research efforts in the severely altered landscapes of the eastern Jemez Mountains. EJLF seeks to address uncertainty by building a network of land managers, scientists, artists, NGOs and interested community members …
Presenters: Jonathan Coop, Western Colorado University; Sean Parks, USDA Forest Service; Camille Stevens-Rumann, Colorado State UniversityDate: November 18, 2020 11am Mountain Time Changing disturbance regimes and climate can overcome forest ecosystem resilience. Following high-severity fire, forest recovery may be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier postfire climate, or short-interval reburning. A …
Read more “Wildfire-Driven Forest Conversion in Western North American landscapes”
by Rachel M. Gregg, EcoAdapt, and Laura A. Marshall, University of Arizona Increasingly common large and severe fires in the Southwest are now often followed by vegetation type conversions (VTC) where once-dominant vegetation fails to return to its pre-fire state. Case studies have documented abrupt transitions from forests to shrublands or from shrublands to grasslands. …
Read more “Southwest Vegetation Type Conversion: A workshop summary”
Released June 26, 2020 as part of the Hot and Dry Podcast Series by Cally Carswell and Collin Haffey, supported by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium. Catastrophic fires in the Southwest are often a double whammy of fire and floods. The floods that followed the 2011 Las Conchas Fire caused massive erosion, impaired water quality, and …
In the spring of 2019, several partners teamed up with the Burned Area Learning Network to visit coordinate a series of three field trips across the Southwest. Scientists, researchers, and land managers came together to visit burned areas of the Boundary Fire (2017) and Pumpkin Fire (2000) in Arizona, the Las Conchas Fire (2011) in …
Read more “After the Fire: Learning from Burned Areas in the Southwest”
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 …
Read more “Evaluating Change in Bird Communities from Wildfire in the Arizona Sky Islands”
Working Paper 43 by Dan Binkley, Adjunct Faculty, School of Forestry, Northern Arizona University Forests and soils interact so strongly that any major change in one of them leads to a reshaping of the other. Fires consume fuels in a few hours that it took vegetation years or decades to produce. Forest soils are both …
Read more “Fire and Soils in Frequent-Fire Landscapes of the Southwest”
Fire Moss: Natural colonization and post-fire rehabilitation trials by Henry Grover, Northern Arizona University
The Museum Fire began on July 21, 2019 in the Dry Lake Hills area just north of downtown Flagstaff. It burned 1,961 acres and cost an estimated $9 million to suppress. We hosted a field trip that involved the Flagstaff Watershed Protection Project (FWPP) that focused on post-fire flooding. Museum Fire Factsheet: Link for Museum …
Presenter: Jonathan Coop, Western Colorado University Date: October 16, 2019 11am AZ/12pm MDT In western North America, ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forest types appear increasingly vulnerable to wildfire-catalyzed conversion to alternate and non-forest vegetation types. However, unburned or only lightly impacted forest stands that persist within burn mosaics—termed fire refugia—may sustain a range critical …