Person

Hugh Safford

7 items:

Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors related to the suppression of the Indigenous use of fire, aggressive fire suppression and, in some cases, changes in logging practices... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
POSCRPT: Postfire Spatial Conifer Restoration Planning Tool Postfire Spatial Conifer Restoration Planning Tool (POSCRPT) R package (and web version) predicts the probability of post-fire conifer regeneration for fire data supplied by the user. The predictive model was fit using presence/absence data collected five years after wildfire, from 1,234 4.4m radius plots (60m2), spanning 19 wildfires in California. Please refer to Stewart et al. (2020) for more details. The poscrptR tool is designed to simplify the process of predicting post-fire conifer regeneration under different precipitation and seed production scenarios. The app was designed to use Rapid Assessment of Vegetative Condition (RAVG) data inputs. The RAVG website has both RdNBR and fire perimeter data sets...
Reduced Fire Severity Offers Near-Term Buffer to Climate-Driven Declines in Conifer Resilience Across the Western United States Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Effects of postfire climate and seed availability on postfire conifer regeneration Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform postfire management in low elevation forests of California, USA, we collected 5‐yr postfire recovery data from 1,234 study plots in 19 wildfires that burned from 2004–2012 and 18 yrs of seed production data from 216 seed fall traps (1999–2017). We used these data in conjunction with spatially extensive climate, topography,... Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Future of Fire in the Southwest: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate Climate change is altering the patterns and characteristics of fire across natural systems in the United States. Resource managers in the Southwest are faced with making natural resource and fire management decisions now, despite a lack of accessible information about how those decisions will play out as fire regimes, and their associated disturbances, will change across the landscape. Decision makers in natural-resource management increasingly require information about projected future changes in fire regimes to effectively prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts. An accessible and forward-looking summary of what we know about the “future of fire” is urgently required in the Southwest and across the country... Categories: Project; Types: Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, OGC WMS Service; Tags: 2020, CASC, Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather, Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather, Drought, Fire and Extreme Weather, All tags...

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