Restoring fire-prone Inland Pacific landscapes: seven core principles

Abstract

Context More than a century of forest and fire management of Inland Pacific landscapes has transformed their successional and disturbance dynamics. Regional connectivity of many terrestrial and aquatic habitats is fragmented, flows of some ecological and physical processes have been altered in space and time, and the frequency, size and intensity of many disturbances that configure these habitats have been altered. Current efforts to address these impacts yield a small footprint in comparison to wildfires and insect outbreaks. Moreover, many current projects emphasize thinning and fuels reduction within individual forest stands, while overlooking large-scale habitat connectivity and disturbance flow issues. Methods We provide a framework for landscape restoration, offering seven principles. We discuss their implication for management, and illustrate their application with examples. Results Historical forests were spatially heterogeneous at multiple scales. Heterogeneity was the result of variability and interactions among native ecological -015-0218-0 patterns and processes, including successional and disturbance processes regulated by climatic and topographic drivers. Native flora and fauna were adapted to these conditions, which conferred a measure of resilience to variability in climate and recurrent contagious disturbances. Conclusions To restore key characteristics of this resilience to current landscapes, planning and management are needed at ecoregion, local landscape, successional patch, and tree neighborhood scales. Restoration that works effectively across ownerships and allocations will require active thinking about landscapes as socio-ecological systems that provide services to people within the finite capacities of ecosystems. We focus attention on landscape-level prescriptions as foundational to restoration planning and execution.Landscape Ecol (2015) 30:1805-1835 DOI 10.1007/s10980

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

“…While these data are useful for general descriptions and tabulations of historical vegetation conditions, they are unsuited to making spatially accurate inferences as to local historical vegetation conditions, or for inferring disturbance regimes from size distributions of trees (Fulé et al, 2014;Stevens et al, in press). While needs vary both regionally and locally, we strongly disagree with the contention that ecological restoration is unnecessary in MSForests of the Inland Pacific West, as do a host of authors throughout the Inland West: Barth et al (2015), Collins et al (2011aCollins et al ( , 2015, Gaines et al (2010aGaines et al ( , 2010b, Spies et al (2010), Hessburg and Agee (2003), Hessburg et al (1999aHessburg et al ( , 1999bHessburg et al ( , 2000aHessburg et al ( , 2005Hessburg et al ( , 2013Hessburg et al ( , 2015, Taylor (2004), Stephens et al (2009Stephens et al ( , 2010Stephens et al ( , 2015, Moghaddas et al (2010), Scholl and Taylor (2010), Hagmann et al (2013Hagmann et al ( , 2014, Merschel et al (2014), Perry et al (2011), Harris and Taylor (2015), and Franklin and Johnson (2012). However, we recognize the importance of stand-replacing fire in appropriate forest types, and at appropriate spatial and temporal scales.…”

“…MSForests occupy a wide range of environments , and they historically exhibited a characteristic patch size distribution, revealing many small and fewer large patches, which resulted in high alpha, beta, and gamma diversity Hessburg et al, 2007Hessburg et al, , 2015Moritz et al, 2011;Perry et al, 2011: Fig. 1a and b).…”

“…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). The variety in pre-management era spatial patterns of forest cover types, tree density, canopy cover, tree sizes and ages, and forest successional conditions was an emergent property of the pyrodiversity of each forest type.…”

“…Reducing these surface and ladder fuels can greatly reduce the likelihood of severe fire behavior (Agee and Skinner, 2005) without substantially altering the late-successional structure of older forests. Conceptual frameworks are needed at patch-to landscape-scales to guide managers seeking to lower the risk of large, high-severity dominated fires, reduce losses to drought and insects, and restore multi-scale habitat heterogeneity (Franklin and Johnson, 2012;Hessburg et al, 2015;North et al, 2014;Stephens et al, 2010;Spies et al, 2012).…”

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

“…In fire research, various indicators have been adopted to delineate topographic characteristics. The most common topographic indicators used in studies include elevation, slope, aspect, topographic wetness index (TWI), solar radiation index (SRI), topographic position index, elevation relief ratio, heat load index, topographic roughness index and gullies (e.g., [19,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]). Because there is no clear evidence indicating which variables are more effective in delineating topographic characteristics, we tried to adopt indicators that have proven to be effective in capturing the complex topographic characteristics of our study areas in previous studies (e.g., [3,10,30]).…”