Climate, fire size, and biophysical setting control fire severity and spatial pattern in the northern Cascade Range, USA

Cansler, C. Alina; McKenzie, Donald

doi:10.1890/13-1077.1

Cited by 196 publications

(195 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…Therefore, burn severity should be understood based on the long-term interactions between topographic characteristics and fuels conditions and the spatial and temporal dimensions must be considered together; however, such a highly complex nonlinear relationship was beyond the scope of this study. Typically, the spatial distribution of fire severity is not linear with elevation and slope [78,79]. We observed similar patterns of red pine trees with elevation, slope, TWI and SRI at the study site, although we could not consider the temporal dimension.…”

Section: Non-linear Relationship Of Topographic Characteristics With mentioning

confidence: 53%

Complex Relationships of the Effects of Topographic Characteristics and Susceptible Tree Cover on Burn Severity

2018

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Forest fires and burn severity mosaics have profound impacts on the post-fire dynamics and complexity of forest ecosystems. Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between topographic variables and susceptible tree covers with regard to burn severity. However, these relationships have not been fully elucidated, because most studies have assumed linearity in these relationships. Therefore, we examined the linearity and the nonlinearity in the relationships between topographic variables and susceptible tree covers with burn severity by comparing linear and nonlinear models. The site of the Samcheok fire, the largest recorded forest fire in Korea, was used as the study area. We generated 802 grid cells with a 500-m resolution that encompassed the entire study area and collected a dataset that included the topographic variables and percentage of red pine trees, which are the most susceptible tree cover types in Korea. We used conventional linear models and generalized additive models to estimate the linear and the nonlinear models based on topographic variables and Japanese red pine trees. The results revealed that the percentage of red pine trees had linear effects on burn severity, reinforcing the importance of silviculture and forest management to lower burn severity. Meanwhile, the topographic variables had nonlinear effects on burn severity. Among the topographic variables, elevation had the strongest nonlinear effect on burn severity, possibly by overriding the effects of susceptible fuels over elevation effects or due to the nonlinear effects of topographic characteristics on pre-fire fuel conditions, including the spatial distribution and availability of susceptible tree cover. To validate and generalize the nonlinear effects of elevation and other topographic variables, additional research is required at different fire sites with different tree cover types in different geographic locations.

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Section: Non-linear Relationship Of Topographic Characteristics With mentioning

confidence: 53%

Complex Relationships of the Effects of Topographic Characteristics and Susceptible Tree Cover on Burn Severity

2018

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“…Pyrodiversity in many MSForests has been simplified by the cumulative effects of past management, environmental changes arising from climatic warming (Abatzoglou and Kolden, 2013;Cansler and McKenzie, 2014), and increasingly larger and more severe wildfires. Because the structural and compositional diversity in MSForests is largely dependent on the prevailing disturbance regime, restoring pyrodiversity is central to restoring MSForests and perhaps most others in the western US (Hessburg et al, 2015).…”

Section: Recent Changes In Msforestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Hessburg

Spies

Perry

et al. 2016

Forest Ecology and Management

177

190

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a b s t r a c tIncreasingly, objectives for forests with moderate-or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland Pacific US, large, old, early seral trees were a key historical feature of many young and old forest successional patches, especially where fires frequently occurred. Large, old trees are naturally fire-tolerant, but today are often threatened by dense understory cohorts that create fuel ladders that alter likely post-fire successional pathways. Reducing these understories can contribute to resistance by creating conditions where canopy trees will survive disturbances and climatic stressors; these survivors are important seed sources, soil protectors, and critical habitat elements. Historical timber harvesting has skewed tree size and age class distributions, created hard edges, and altered native patch sizes. Manipulating these altered forests to promote development of larger patches of older, larger, and more widely-spaced trees with diverse understories will increase landscape resistance to severe fires, and enhance wildlife habitat for underrepresented conditions.Closed-canopy, multi-layered patches that develop in hot, dry summer environments are vulnerable to droughts, and they increase landscape vulnerability to insect outbreaks and severe wildfires. These same patches provide habitat for species such as the northern spotted owl, which has benefited from increased habitat area. Regional and local planning will be critical for gauging risks, evaluating trade-offs, and restoring dynamics that can support these and other species. The goal will be to manage for heterogeneous landscapes that include variably-sized patches of (1) young, middle-aged, and old, closedcanopy forests growing in upper montane, northerly aspect, and valley bottom settings, (2) a similar diversity of open-canopy, fire-tolerant patches growing on ridgetops, southerly aspects, and lower montane settings, and (3) significant montane chaparral and grassland areas. Tools to achieve this goal http://dx

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“…DGVMs were indeed more recently evaluated, also in terms of fire size distribution [11], and were increasingly oriented to fire shape metrics and fire spread processes [64]. For example, fire intensity can be related to fire patch features as the ratio between core area/area index [65] or fire patch elongation [66], when coupled with fire line intensity, as a function of fuel biomass and water status, and fire rate of spread. Recently, this fire rate of spread within fire patches has been investigated according to burn dates from pixel products of global BA or hotspots [67][68][69] and for which the accuracy in the timing of burn dates has been investigated [70], and establish here the forthcoming developments in global fire analysis and modeling.…”

Section: Implications For Pyrogeography and Dgvm Benchmarkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can We Go Beyond Burned Area in the Assessment of Global Remote Sensing Products with Fire Patch Metrics?

et al. 2016

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Global burned area (BA) datasets from satellite Earth observations provide information for carbon emission and for Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) benchmarking. Fire patch identification from pixel-level information recently emerged as an additional way of providing informative features about fire regimes through the analysis of patch size distribution. We evaluated the ability of global BA products to accurately represent morphological features of fire patches, in the fire-prone Brazilian savannas. We used the pixel-level burned area from LANDSAT images, as well as two global products: MODIS MCD45A1 and the European Space Agency (ESA) fire Climate Change Initiative (FIRE_CCI) product for the 2002-2009 time period. Individual fire patches were compared by linear regressions to test the consistency of global products as a source of burned patch shape information. Despite commission and omission errors respectively reaching 0.74 and 0.81 for ESA FIRE_CCI and 0.64 and 0.62 for MCD45A1 when compared to LANDSAT due to missing small fires, correlations between patch areas showed R 2 > 0.6 for all comparisons, with a slope of 0.99 between ESA FIRE_CCI and MCD45A1 but a lower slope (0.6-0.8) when compared to the LANDSAT data. Shape complexity between global products was less correlated (R 2 = 0.5) with lower values (R 2 = 0.2) between global products and LANDSAT data, due to their coarser resolution. For the morphological features of the ellipse fitted over fire patches, R 2 reached 0.6 for the ellipse's eccentricity and varied from 0.4 to 0.8 for its azimuthal directional angle. We conclude that global BA products underestimate total BA as they miss small fires, but they also underestimate burned patch areas. Patch complexity is the least correlated variable, but ellipse features appear to provide information to be further used for quality product assessment, global pyrogeography or DGVM benchmarking.

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Climate, fire size, and biophysical setting control fire severity and spatial pattern in the northern Cascade Range, USA

Cited by 196 publications

References 93 publications

Complex Relationships of the Effects of Topographic Characteristics and Susceptible Tree Cover on Burn Severity

Complex Relationships of the Effects of Topographic Characteristics and Susceptible Tree Cover on Burn Severity

Tamm Review: Management of mixed-severity fire regime forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California

Can We Go Beyond Burned Area in the Assessment of Global Remote Sensing Products with Fire Patch Metrics?

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