Mastication and prescribed fire impacts on fuels in a 25-year old ponderosa pine plantation, southern Sierra Nevada

Effects of Wildland-Urban Interface Fuel Treatments on Potential Fire Behavior and Ecosystem Services in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains of California

“…In addition, computer simulation output is heavily dependent on assumptions of fuelbed homogeneity which often do not reflect real-world conditions. Nonetheless, trends evident in the current study generally reflect findings from other mixed-conifer fuel and fire behavior studies in the region (Stephens and Moghaddas, 2005a;Ritchie et al, 2007;Schmidt et al, 2008;Kobziar et al., 2009;Reiner et al, 2009;Schwilk et al, 2009;Stephens et al, 2009a). These trends were most consistent with other research for treatments combining mechanical thinning with prescribed fire, and include significant fuel treatment-related reductions in trees ha -1 , canopy cover, CBD, and predicted flame length, as well as significant increases in CBH and predicted TI and CI.…”

“…A different conclusion was reached by Reiner et al (2009). By increasing surface fuels, the authors argued, mastication is likely to increase more intense fire behavior including increased potential residence time and flame depth.…”

“…However, this frequently triggers lawsuits by a distrustful public who feel that the proposed project is either too intensive, or not intensive enough (Barbour et al, 2007). From an ecological perspective, the retention of large, fire-resistant trees is recommended because it increases overall ecosystem fire resilience (Franklin and Agee, 2003;Agee and Skinner, 2005), and generally speaking, large-tree removal is secondary to the reduction of surface fuels and thinning smaller ladder-fuel trees when considering wildfire hazard mitigation overall (North et al, 2009b (Kane et al, 2009), although it may also be used as a preliminary treatment prior to prescribed burning (Glitzenstein et al, 2006;Reiner et al, 2009). Despite the growing popularity of this treatment type, current scientific knowledge on mastication is limited ).…”

Impacts of Mastication: Soil Seed Bank Responses to a Forest Thinning Treatment in Three Colorado (USA) Conifer Forest Types

“…As fuels are not removed from the site following mastication, the treatment results in greater biomass distributed onto the forest floor [8,11,[13][14][15][16][17]. A heterogeneous deposition of masticated materials, or mulch, can lead to variable responses in understory plant cover [18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

Fuel treatment effectiveness in forests of the upper Atlantic Coastal Plain – An evaluation at two spatial scales

“…However, they note that fire behavior fuel models in their modeling approach did not accurately characterize the vertical arrangement of fuels. Depending on fire weather conditions, fuels that have been chipped or shredded may represent a short-term increase in surface fire behavior and fire duration (Glitzenstein et al 2006;Reiner et al, 2009). Southern pine species are well-adapted to high levels of crown scorch but are susceptible to mortality from root damage in long-duration surface fires (Brose and Wade, 2002).…”