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Restoration and fuel hazard reduction result in equivalent reductions in crown fire behavior in dry conifer forests
Ecological Applications ( IF 5 ) Pub Date : 2022-05-19 , DOI: 10.1002/eap.2682
Scott M Ritter 1 , Chad M Hoffman 2 , Mike A Battaglia 3 , Theresa B Jain 4
Affiliation  

Over the past several decades, the management of historically frequent-fire forests in the western United States has received significant attention due to the linked ecological and social risks posed by the increased occurrence of large, contiguous patches of high-severity fire. As a result, efforts are underway to simultaneously reduce potential fire and fuel hazards and restore characteristics indicative of historical forest structures and ecological processes that enhance the diversity and quality of wildlife habitat across landscapes. Despite widespread agreement on the need for action, there is a perceived tension among scientists concerning silvicultural treatments that modify stands to optimally reduce potential fire behavior (fuel hazard reduction) versus those that aim to emulate historical forest structures and create structurally complex stands (restoration). In this work, we evaluated thinning treatments in the Black Hills National Forest that exemplify the extremes of a treatment continuum that ranges from fuel hazard reduction to restoration. The goal of this work was to understand how the differing three-dimensional stand structures created by these treatment approaches altered potential fire behavior. Our results indicate that restoration treatments created higher levels of vertical and horizontal structural complexity than the fuel hazard reduction treatments but resulted in similar reductions to potential crown fire behavior. There were some trade-offs identified as the restoration treatments created larger openings, which generated faster mean rates of fire spread; however, these increased spread rates did not translate to higher levels of canopy consumption. Overall, our results suggest that treatments can create vertical and horizontal complexity desired for restoration and wildlife habitat management while reducing fire hazard and that they can be used in concert with traditional fuel hazard reduction treatments to reduce landscape scale fire risk. We also provide some suggestions to land managers seeking to design and implement prescriptions that emulate historical structures and enhance forest complexity.

中文翻译:

恢复和燃料危害减少导致干燥针叶林中树冠火灾行为的减少

在过去的几十年里,美国西部历史上经常发生火灾的森林的管理受到了极大的关注,因为大片连续的高强度火灾的发生率增加会带来相关的生态和社会风险。因此,正在努力同时减少潜在的火灾和燃料危害,并恢复表明历史森林结构和生态过程的特征,这些特征可以提高景观中野生动物栖息地的多样性和质量。尽管人们普遍认为需要采取行动,科学家之间存在一种明显的紧张关系,即修改林分以最佳地减少潜在火灾行为(减少燃料危害)的造林处理与旨在模仿历史森林结构并创建结构复杂的林分(恢复)的造林处理。在这项工作中,我们评估了黑山国家森林的间伐处理,这些处理举例说明了从减少燃料危害到恢复的处理连续体的极端情况。这项工作的目的是了解这些处理方法创建的不同三维林分结构如何改变潜在的火灾行为。我们的结果表明,恢复处理比燃料危害减少处理产生了更高水平的垂直和水平结构复杂性,但对潜在的树冠火灾行为产生了类似的减少。确定了一些权衡,因为修复处理会产生更大的开口,从而产生更快的平均火势蔓延速度;然而,这些增加的传播率并没有转化为更高水平的树冠消耗。总体而言,我们的结果表明,处理可以创造恢复和野生动物栖息地管理所需的纵向和横向复杂性,同时减少火灾危险,并且它们可以与传统的燃料减灾处理协同使用,以降低景观规模的火灾风险。
更新日期:2022-05-19
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