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Wildfires are increasing in size and severity because of a warming climate in combination with overstocked forests. Fire increases the likelihood of debris flows, posing significant threats to life, property, and water supplies. Post-fire debris flows are a substantial, increasing hazard in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed and other similar forested watersheds across the western United States. The Santa Fe Municipal Watershed in northern New Mexico is of vital importance to the water supply for the city of Santa Fe. We conducted a debris-flow hazard assessment for the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed (SFMW) in north-central New Mexico. We modeled post-fire debris flow probability and volume in 103 sub-basins for 2-year,...
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The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using proactive forest management (e.g. forest thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning) to mitigate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests. To estimate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in western United States (US) conifer forests, we used a generalizable framework to evaluate interactions among wildfire hazard and carbon exposure and vulnerability. By evaluating where high social adaptive capacity for proactive forest management overlaps with carbon most vulnerable to wildfire-caused carbon loss, we identified opportunity hot spots for reducing the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss. We found that relative to...
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