USGS Firelight - Vol. 2 | Issue 1
New Mexico Landscapes Field Station Research informs Fire Management
Researchers at the New Mexico Landscapes Field Station, part of the Fort Collins Science Center, use tree-ring fire scars as part of a place-based science approach to establish a historical record of fire that informs present-day fire management practices.
Wildland Fire Science in Forests and Deserts
Fuel conditions and fire regimes in western forests and deserts have been altered due to past land management, biological invasions, and recent extreme weather events and climate shifts. These changes have created extreme fire risk to local and regional communities, threatening their economic health related to wildland recreation, forest production, livestock operations, and other uses of public lands. Dr. Matthew Brooks and his staff at the Yosemite-Oakhurst Field Station develop science products to help understand why these changes are occurring and what land managers can do to mitigate their negative effects. They communicate this information to land managers through direct relationships, workshops, shared databases, and interagency working groups. The information is communicated and archived for use by the general scientific community through journal articles, books, fact sheets, scientific meetings, and involvement by Dr. Brooks and his staff in the Association for Fire Ecology.
The Innovation Landscape Network
As public lands continue to experience rapid change brought on by fire, invasive species, and climate change, there is a growing need for science-management partnerships to apply innovative research, technology and adaptation strategies to support decision-making at an accelerated pace.
Long-term place-based monitoring at New Mexico field station
Providing land managers, scientists, and communities with diverse information on landscape responses to climate and disturbances
Understanding Fire-caused Vegetation Type Conversion in Southwestern Conifer Forests under Current and Future Climate Conditions
Fire size, frequency, overall area burned, and severity are increasing across many vegetation types in the southwestern U.S. In many cases, large contiguous areas are burning repeatedly at high severity, triggering vegetation type conversions (VTC), where once-dominant coniferous forests fail to return to their pre-fire state, often transitioning to shrub- or grass-dominated systems. Loss of these
An adaptive management framework to control invasive annual brome grasses in Northern Great Plains parks (ABAM)
Invasion by annual brome grasses (cheatgrass and Japanese brome) and other exotic annual grasses into National Park Service units (parks) in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) impacts park ecological and historical landscape integrity. The Annual Brome Adaptive Management (ABAM) decision support tool (DST) was built to support vegetation management decision making, particularly regarding these invasive annual grasses, of seven NGP parks. The ABAM DST is based on scientific literature and 20 years of vegetation monitoring in the seven ABAM parks. In each year of an adaptive management cycle, the DST is updated with recent monitoring data, then used to quantify the state of the vegetation in each park management unit, compare the predicted outcomes of 10 different management actions for each of those units, and determine the optimal management action for the next year according to park managers’ relative acceptance of different vegetation states. Implementation of the ABAM framework and use of the DST in that framework began in 2021. USGS continues to work with NPS in refining the ABAM DST and exploring its implications for long-term vegetation management in NGP parks.
Water Quality After Wildfire
Wildfires pose a substantial risk to water supplies because they can lead to severe flooding, erosion, and delivery of sediment, nutrients, and metals to rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. The USGS works with federal and state land managers and local water providers to monitor and assess water quality after wildfires in order to help protect our Nation’s water resources.