Fuel treatments and fire severity: A meta-analysis

Martinson, Erik J.; Omi, Philip N.

doi:10.2737/rmrs-rp-103

Cited by 78 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 8 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…Fuel treatment effectiveness, including PB, varies with vegetation and treatment type [11]. PB is stand replacing in open, single-layered vegetation types (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical Support for the Use of Prescribed Burning as a Fuel Treatment

Fernandes

2015

Curr Forestry Rep

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Prescribed burning as a fuel treatment seeks to moderate wildfire impacts and decreases the areal extent of wildfires by increasing the effectiveness of fire suppression. Assessment of prescribed burning effectiveness is frequently anecdotal or based on simulation. This paper examines recent observational evidence of prescribed fire effectiveness. The spread rate and intensity of experimental fires in distinct fuel types have been shown to increase with time since treatment (fuel age) following fuel structure recovery. Prescribed fire constrains the size and especially the severity of individual fires, even under extremely severe weather conditions. At larger spatial and temporal scales of analysis, the effect of fuel age on unplanned fire severity is also evident, whether it comes from wildfires entering treated areas or from wildfires in fuel-reduced areas resulting from earlier wildfire occurrences. The persistence of these effects is variable, depending on vegetation type and productivity. The long-term reduction in wildfire area brought about by prescribed fire can be difficult to ascertain. Substantial effort (annual treatment rates >5 % of the landscape) has been shown to effectively control the extent of wildfires in forests, with 3-4 units of prescribed burning needed to reduce wildfire by one unit. Future studies should consider the decrease in area burned by high-severity fire as a more meaningful and objective measure of prescribed fire effectiveness than the decrease in wildfire area and should strive to document fire behaviour in treated versus untreated areas during wildfires.

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“…Fuel treatment effectiveness, including PB, varies with vegetation and treatment type [11]. PB is stand replacing in open, single-layered vegetation types (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical Support for the Use of Prescribed Burning as a Fuel Treatment

Fernandes

2015

Curr Forestry Rep

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“…When untreated forest burns under severe fire weather conditions, fire severity is generally high (Martinson and Omi 2013;Safford et al 2012;Stevens et al 2014). When treated forest burns in a wildfire, there is generally less effect on the forest overstory than in untreated forest, suggesting that treatments can increase forest resilience to future disturbance.…”

Section: Effects On Vegetationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In YPMC forests, fuel treatments have proven effective at reducing fire severity and tree mortality, restoring forest structure and protecting human infrastructure and lives across the western United States (Martinson and Omi 2013;Safford et al 2009;Safford et al 2012). They also hold promise as sources of forest biomass, which can be used to produce a variety of timber and nontimber forest products as well as energy through biomass burning (Evans and Finkral 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of fuel treatments on California mixed-conifer forests

Winford¹,

Stevens²,

Safford³

2015

Cal Ag

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Land managers implement forest fuel reduction treatments, including prescribed fire, mastication, and hand-and mechanical thinning, to modify wildfire behavior. Fuel treatments decrease tree density, increase mean canopy base height and remove surface fuels, and have been shown to reduce fire severity in yellow pine and mixed-conifer forests, even under relatively severe weather conditions. However, less is known about the impacts of fuel treatments on other facets of forest ecology. Synthesizing evidence from the scientific literature regarding their effects on forest structure, carbon, vegetation, soils, wildlife and forest pests, we found a developing consensus that fuel treatments, particularly those that include a prescribed fire component, may have neutral to positive effects on a number of ecological processes in frequent-fire coniferous forests and may increase forest resilience to future disturbance and stress.

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“…They concluded that with few exceptions, fire severity measures, such as bole char height, scorch and torch height, scorch and torch percentage, and tree mortality were much lower in forest stands treated for fuels than in neighboring untreated stands. Martinson et al [9] developed a meta-analytic model to synthesize results from 19 publications that reported observed fire responses from 62 treated versus untreated contrasts in confer forests. Their final model was highly significant (p < 0.001) and explained 78% of the variability in reported observations of fuel treatment effectiveness, indicating that the overall mean effect of fuel treatments on fire intensity and severity is large and significant.…”

Section: Potential Benefits Of Fuel Reduction Treatments In Forested mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importance or objective (3, 5, 7) (9, 10, 10) (7,9,10) In the fourth step, fuzzy TOPSIS is applied to the triangular fuzzy numbers in Table 4 to rank the three FRTs for each climate future. The ranking for the constructed example is shown in Table 5.…”

Section: Constructed Example For Public Landscape (Case 2)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of Forest Fuel Reduction Treatments and Their Adaptation to Climate Change

Prato

2015

Sustainability

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Applying fuel reduction treatments (FRTs) to forested landscapes can alleviate undesirable changes in wildfire benefits and costs due to climate change. A conceptual framework was developed for determining the preferred FRTs across planning periods, adapting FRTs to future climate change, assessing the sustainability of adaptive responses to climate change, and evaluating the validity of the two premises motivating this issue of Sustainability. The conceptual framework: (1) accounts for uncertainty about future climate change and its effects on management objectives for FRTs; (2) employs biophysical simulation and mental models to estimate the management objectives for FRTs; (3) uses fuzzy TOPSIS to determine the preferred FRTs for climate futures; (4) employs the minimax regret criterion to identify the preferred FRT for each planning period; (5) determines the best strategy for adapting FRTs to future climate change; and (6) assesses landscape sustainability when using the preferred FRTs. The framework is demonstrated with constructed examples for adapting FRTs to climate change for privately-and publicly-owned forested landscapes. Based on the conceptual framework, current knowledge does not allow determining with certainty whether managers' adaptations of FRTs to future climate change are sustainable or unsustainable due to type I and II decision errors.

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Fuel treatments and fire severity: A meta-analysis

Cited by 78 publications

References 8 publications

Empirical Support for the Use of Prescribed Burning as a Fuel Treatment

Empirical Support for the Use of Prescribed Burning as a Fuel Treatment

Effects of fuel treatments on California mixed-conifer forests

Conceptual Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of Forest Fuel Reduction Treatments and Their Adaptation to Climate Change

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