Publications

The actions of residents in the wildland–urban interface can influence the private and social costs of wildfire. Wildfire programs that encourage residents to take action are often delivered without evidence of effects on behavior. Research from the field of behavioral science shows that simple, often low-cost changes to program design and delivery can influence socially desirable...

The western purple martin (Progne subis arboricola), an avian insectivore, is a species of conservation concern throughout the Pacific Northwest. Compared to the well-studied eastern subspecies (Progne subis subis), little is known of the life history and biology of the western subspecies. Availability of breeding habitat is believed to be a major limiting factor for western purple...

Increasing aridity is a challenge for forest managers and reducing stand density to minimize competition is a recognized strategy to mitigate drought impacts on growth. In many dry forests, the most widespread and common forest management programs currently being implemented focus on restoration of historical stand structures, primarily to minimize fire risk and enhance watershed...

Postfire shifts in vegetation composition will have broad ecological impacts. However, information characterizing postfire recovery patterns and their drivers are lacking over large spatial extents. In this analysis, we used Landsat imagery collected when snow cover (SCS) was present, in combination with growing season (GS) imagery, to distinguish evergreen vegetation from deciduous...

Lake Tahoe, a large freshwater lake of the eastern Sierra Nevada in California and Nevada, has 63 tributaries that are sources of nutrients and sediment to the lake. The Tahoe watershed is relatively small, and the surface area of the lake occupies about 38% of the watershed area (1313 km2). Only about 6% of the watershed is urbanized or residential land, and as part of a plan to...

Research on the social dimensions of wildfire provides opportunities to understand how communities and the people who reside in those communities interact with the threat of wildfire. Overall, three findings from this project were particularly noteworthy. First, household survey results indicate that residents in the Squilchuck Drainage, Chelan County, Washington have high expectations...

Land managers need new tools for planning novel futures due to climate change. Species distribution modeling (SDM) has been used extensively to predict future distributions of species under different climates, but their map products are often too coarse for fine-scale operational use. In this study we developed a flexible, efficient, and robust method for mapping current and future...

Tallgrass prairie is a disturbance‐dependent ecosystem that has suffered steep declines in the midwestern United States. The necessity of disturbance, typically fire or grazing, presents challenges to managers who must apply them on increasingly small and fragmented parcels. The goal of this study was to compare effects of management using cattle grazing or fire on vegetation and soil

Questions Relative to a landscape with a mosaic of two sagebrush community types and increasing fire frequency, we asked: (a) do vegetation characteristics vary significantly with number of times burned for each sagebrush community; (b) how do vegetation responses to different fire frequencies compare between the two sagebrush communities?Location Columbia Plateau Ecoregion, Washington...

In the semiarid Southwestern USA, wildfires are commonly followed by runoff-generated debris flows because wildfires remove vegetation and ground cover, which reduces soil infiltration capacity and increases soil erodibility. At a study site in Southern California, we initially observed runoff-generated debris flows in the first year following fire. However, at the same site three years...

The past decade includes some of the most extensive boreal forest fires in the historical record. Warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, the desiccation of thick organic soil layers, and increased ignition from lightning all contribute to a combustive combination. Smoke aerosols travel thousands of kilometers, before blanketing the surfaces on which they fall, such as the...

Boreal ecosystems comprise one tenth of the world’s land surface and contain over 20 % of the global soil carbon (C) stocks. Boreal soils are unique in that its mineral soil is covered by what can be quite thick layers of organic soil. These organic soil layers, or horizons, can differ in their state of decomposition, source vegetation, and disturbance history. These differences result...