An accuracy assessment of the MTBS burned area product for shrub–steppe fires in the northern Great Basin, United States

Sparks, Aaron M.; Boschetti, Luigi; Smith, Alistair M. S.; Tinkham, Wade T.; Lannom, K. O.; Newingham, Beth A.

doi:10.1071/wf14131

Cited by 50 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Future research can evaluate fire and fuel treatment interactions with respect to treatment objectives when such data become available. MTBS fire perimeters can fail to detect unburned islands and oversimplify complex polygon geometries [55]; these limitations are unlikely to affect the interpretation of our results due to the spatial scale of our analysis and the metrics we summarize. Even though large, recently treated areas can mitigate fire spread [56] and therefore affect future encounter rates, we did not explicitly evaluate fire sizes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Beyond Fuel Treatment Effectiveness: Characterizing Interactions between Fire and Treatments in the US

Barnett

Parks

Miller

et al. 2016

Forests

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Abstract:In the United States, fuel reduction treatments are a standard land management tool to restore the structure and composition of forests that have been degraded by past management. Although treatments can have multiple purposes, their principal objective is to create landscape conditions where wildland fire can be safely managed to help achieve long-term land management goals. One critique is that fuel treatment benefits are unlikely to transpire due to the low probability that treated areas will be burned by a subsequent fire within a treatment's lifespan, but little quantitative information exists to corroborate this argument. We summarized the frequency, extent, and geographic variation of fire and fuel treatment interactions on federal lands within the conterminous United States (CONUS). We also assessed how the encounters between fuel treatments and fires varied with treatment size, treatment age, and number of times treated. Overall, 6.8% of treatment units evaluated were encountered by a subsequent fire during the study period, though this rate varied among ecoregions across the CONUS. Larger treatment units were more likely to be encountered by a fire, and treatment units were most frequently burned within one year of the most recent treatment, the latter of which is likely because of ongoing maintenance of existing treatments. Our results highlight the need to identify and prioritize additional opportunities to reduce fuel loading and fire risk on the millions of hectares of federal lands in the CONUS that are in need of restoration.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Beyond Fuel Treatment Effectiveness: Characterizing Interactions between Fire and Treatments in the US

Barnett

Parks

Miller

et al. 2016

Forests

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“…Burn severity can be highly variable in space and, although maps of burn severity are not as reliable in sagebrush steppe as in other habitats (Sparks et al ), they nonetheless are one of the primary sources of information for planning treatments. The lower survival of outplanted seedlings in transects mapped as having higher burn severity could relate to increases in available nitrogen following fire (Rau et al ), which would agree with Herriman et al's () observation of reduced sagebrush seedling survival with fertilization that can favor competing herbs (Melgoza et al ; Chambers et al ; Vasquez et al ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Landscape and organismal factors affecting sagebrush‐seedling transplant survival after megafire restoration

Davidson

Germino

Richardson

et al. 2019

Restoration Ecology

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Larger and more frequent disturbances are motivating efforts to accelerate recovery of foundational perennial species by focusing efforts into establishing island patches to sustain keystone species and facilitate recovery of the surrounding plant community. Evaluating the variability in abiotic and biotic factors that contribute to differences in survival and establishment can provide useful insight into the relative importance of these factors. In the western United States, severe degradation of the sagebrush steppe has motivated substantial efforts to restore native perennial cover, but success has been mixed. In this study, we evaluated survival of more than 3,000 sagebrush seedlings transplanted on 12 patches totaling 650 ha within a 113,000 ha burn area, and related the survival to organismal and subtaxonomic traits, and to landscape variables. Big sagebrush has high intraspecific diversity attributed to subspecies and cytotypes identifiable through ultraviolet (UV)‐induced fluorescence, length:width of leaves, or genome size (ploidy). Of these organismal traits, survival was related only to UV fluorescence, and then only so when landscape variables were excluded from analyses. The most significant landscape variable affecting survival was soil taxonomic subgroup, with much lower survival where buried restrictive layers reduce deep water infiltration. Survival also decreased with greater slope steepness, exotic annual grass cover, and burn severity. Survival was optimal where perennial bunchgrasses comprised 8–14% of total cover. These soil, topographic, and community condition factors revealed through monitoring of landscape‐level treatments can be used to explain the success of plantings and to strategically plan future restoration projects.

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“…, Sparks et al. ). We simplified our approach by merging classes to examine larger differences between burn severity, removed sites measured in the year of a burn, and limited our analysis to quantifying vegetation impacts at severity levels.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This examination across a large extent required the use of databases collected in separate studies for multiple purposes. For example, the burn severity approach was developed for forests and often use imagery from the growing season after the burn (Key 2006), which can be limiting due to relatively sparse vegetation and heterogeneous burn patterns in burn severity data for the Great Basin (Kolden et al 2015, Sparks et al 2015. We simplified our approach by merging classes to examine larger differences between burn severity, removed sites measured in the year of a burn, and limited our analysis to quantifying vegetation impacts at severity levels.…”

Section: Additional Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire and development influences on sagebrush community plant groups across a climate gradient in northern Nevada

et al. 2019

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The sagebrush biome covers much of the western United States yet is at risk from ongoing disturbances. Physical disturbances such as fire often overcome the resistance of sagebrush communities to biological disturbances such as invasion by non‐native species, but the impact of burn severity or combined disturbance types on sagebrush community composition remains unclear. We examined the relationship between native functional groups and non‐native annual grass cover to the number of fires, burn severity, anthropogenic development, and vegetation treatments in northern Nevada, USA. We used Bureau of Land Management vegetation monitoring plots and existing climate, fire, and vegetation treatment databases to explore relationships using beta regression. After accounting for mean annual precipitation and temperature, and elevation, we quantified functional group mean cover related to levels of burn severity, numbers of fires, development, and vegetation treatments. Native herbaceous (grass and forb) groups were resilient to fire, but fire caused large declines in shrub and sagebrush cover. Non‐native annual grass cover was associated with higher burn severity and the first fire at a site. We did not find evidence that post‐fire restoration treatments were associated with increased native cover or decreased non‐native cover. However, shrub control and soil disturbing treatments (discing and chaining) were associated with decreased native perennial grass cover and increased non‐native annual grass cover. Functional groups displayed varying patterns related to anthropogenic development and fire. For example, development had a larger impact on non‐native cover at lower levels of burn severity, whereas forbs increased following fire only at lower levels of development. Although in some cases sagebrush communities showed resilience to disturbance, our results showed resistance to invasion by non‐native annual grasses can be overcome by combinations of disturbances at lower levels or by severe events.

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An accuracy assessment of the MTBS burned area product for shrub–steppe fires in the northern Great Basin, United States

Cited by 50 publications

References 38 publications

Beyond Fuel Treatment Effectiveness: Characterizing Interactions between Fire and Treatments in the US

Beyond Fuel Treatment Effectiveness: Characterizing Interactions between Fire and Treatments in the US

Landscape and organismal factors affecting sagebrush‐seedling transplant survival after megafire restoration

Fire and development influences on sagebrush community plant groups across a climate gradient in northern Nevada

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