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Managing Wildfire Risk in Fire-Prone Landscapes: How Are Private Landowners Contributing?
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The fire-prone landscapes include both public and private lands. Wildfire burns indiscriminately across property boundaries, which means that the way potential fuels are managed on one piece of property can affect wildfire risk on neighboring lands. KeY FINdINGS
• Private forest landowners who perceive great fire risk or are concerned about hazardous fuel conditions on nearby public lands are more likely to reduce fuels on their properties and cooperate with public agencies on fuel reduction.
• Most private landowners surveyed reduce fuel independently, rather than in cooperation with others, primarily because of distrust and social norms about private property ownership.
• Forest owners who live on a forested parcel of land are much more likely to reduce fuels on that parcel than are owners who maintain residences elsewhere.
• Limited opportunity to offset the costs of fuel reduction (e.g., with public incentive programs or income from markets for logs and wood products) poses greater constraints to fuel reduction by private forest owners than does lack of knowledge or skills.
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Characterizing Fire-on-Fire interactions in three Large Wilderness areas
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The interaction of fires, where one fire burns into another recently burned area, is receiving increased attention from scientists and land managers wishing to describe the role of fire scars in affecting landscape pattern and future fire spread. Here, we quantify fire-on- fire interactions in terms of frequency, size, and time-since-previous fire (TSPF) in three large wilderness areas in Montana and Idaho, USA, from 1984 to present, using spatially consistent large fire perimeter data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) dataset. The analysis is supplemented with less consistent fire perimeter data from a re- gional fire atlas in order to examine the potential role played by smaller fires in fire-on-fire interactions. We compare current rates of burning to existing estimates using the natural fire rotation (NFR) to determine whether recent fire activity falls within established historical ranges. We also compare actual fires to randomly located fires to establish whether the frequency and size of re-burns differ by chance. Finally, we systematically classify shared fire edges as fire-stopping or breached to quantify the effect of previous fires on subsequent fire spread. In total, more than half of the Frank Church, one-quarter of the Bob Marshall, and fifteen percent of the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness areas have burned since 1984. Area burned within each of the study areas yielded NFRs that are consistent with results derived from fire atlas and tree-ring research studies. The data show that re- burning occurs less frequently than chance in the Frank Church Wilderness Area, perhaps less frequently in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, and the same as chance in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area. In each of the study areas, the total amount of edge at which a fire met another fire was less than three percent of the total available perimeter. However, ~80% of the total edge encountered was breached, resulting in fire spreading onto previously burned landscapes and re-burning at least 40 ha. Year-to-year variability in re-burn occurrence was high, and the size of re-burns was typically small, implying a general resistance to re-burning, but the preponderance of small patches resulting from fire interactions has perhaps significant ecological implications. There was a systematic decrease in the frequency of small to medium sized re-burns (40 ha to 405 ha) as time be- tween fires increased in all three wilderness areas. The frequency of large re-burns in- creased with time in the Frank Church wilderness area, but this trend was not apparent in the other two wilderness areas. Overall, fire-on-fire interactions show a high degree of complexity, making direct comparisons between the three wilderness areas difficult, but the evidence suggests that large wildfires generally inhibit the spread of subsequent fires, while small fires appear to have little impact on the spread of other fires.
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Robust spatially aggregated projections of climate extremes
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Many climatic extremes are changing1–5, and decision-makers express a strong need for reliable information on further changes over the coming decades as a basis for adaptation strategies. Here, we demonstrate that for extremes stakeholders will have to deal with large irreducible uncertainties on local to regional scales as a result of internal variability, even if climate models improve rapidly. A multimember initial condition ensemble carried out with an Earth system model shows that trends towards more intense hot and less intense cold extremes may be masked or even reversed locally for the coming three to five decades even if greenhouse gas emissions rapidly increase. Likewise, despite a long-term trend towards more intense precipitation and longer dry spells, multidecadal trends of op- posite sign cannot be excluded over many land points. However, extremes may dramatically change at a rate much larger than anticipated from the long-term signal. Despite these large irreducible uncertainties on the local scale, projections are remarkably consistent from an aggregated spatial probability perspective. Models agree that within only three decades about half of the land fraction will see significantly more intense hot extremes. We show that even in the short term the land fraction experiencing more intense precipitation events is larger than expected from internal variability. The proposed perspective yields valuable information for decision-makers and stakeholders at the international level.
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Five Stages of Climate Grief
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University of Montana Professor, climate scientist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Steve W. Running has written about "The 5 Stages of Climate Grief." Modeled after Elisabeth Kubler- Ross's Five Stages of Grief model, Running's essay focuses on understanding each stage to move to the final stage of acceptance more easily. Running explains how people must accept global warming as a problem before they resolve to do something about it.
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Does global warming favour the occurrence of extreme floods in European Alps? First evidences from a NW Alps proglacial lake sediment record
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Our record suggests climate warming is favouring the occurrence of high magnitude torrential flood events in high-altitude catchments.
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Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States
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Despite significant recent public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the United States have systematically compared the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG- intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories
from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.
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The Impact of Boreal Forest Fire on Climate Warming
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We report measurements and analysis of a boreal forest fire, integrating the effects of greenhouse gases, aerosols, black carbon deposition on snow and sea ice, and postfire changes in surface albedo. The net effect of all agents was to increase radiative forcing during the first year (34 ± 31 Watts per square meter of burned area), but to decrease radiative forcing when averaged over an 80-year fire cycle (−2.3 ± 2.2 Watts per square meter) because multidecadal increases in surface albedo had a larger impact than fire-emitted greenhouse gases. This result implies that future increases in boreal fire may not accelerate climate warming.
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Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland
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It is difficult to obtain fossil data from the 10% of Earth’s terrestrial surface that is covered by thick glaciers and ice sheets, and hence, knowledge of the paleoenvironments of these regions has remained limited. We show that DNA and amino acids from buried organisms can be recovered from the basal sections of deep ice cores, enabling reconstructions of past flora and fauna. We show that high-altitude southern Greenland, currently lying below more than 2 kilometers of ice, was inhabited by a diverse array of conifer trees and insects within the past million years. The results provide direct evidence in support of a forested southern Greenland and suggest that many deep ice cores may contain genetic records of paleoenvironments in their basal sections.
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The potential transient dynamics of forests in New England under historical and projected future climate change
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Projections of vegetation distribution that incorporate the transient responses of vegetation to climate change are likely to be more efficacious than those that assume an equilibrium between climate and vegetation. We examine the non-equilibrium dynamics of a temperate forest region under historic and projected future climate change using the dynamic ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS. We parameterized LPJ-GUESS for the New England region of the United Sates utilizing eight forest cover types that comprise the regionally dominant species. We developed a set of climate data at a monthly-step and a 30-arc second spatial resolution to run the model. These datasets consist of past climate observations for the period 1901–2006 and three general circulation model projections for the period 2007–2099. Our baseline (1971–2000) simulation reproduces the distribution of forest types in our study region as compared to the National Land Cover Data 2001 (Kappa statistic00.54). Under historic and nine future climate change scenarios, maple-beech-basswood, oaks and aspen- birch were modeled to move upslope at an estimated rate of 0.2, 0.3 and 0.5 myr−1 from 1901 to 2006, and continued this trend at an accelerated rate of around 0.5, 0.9 and 1.7 myr−1 from 2007 to 2099. Spruce-fir and white pine-cedar were modeled to contract to mountain ranges and cooler regions of our study region under projected future climate change scenarios. By the end of the 21st century, 60% of New England is projected to be dominated by oaks relative to 21% at the beginning of the 21st century, while northern New England is modeled to be dominated by aspen-birch. In mid and central New England, maple-beech-basswood, yellow birch-elm and hickories co-occur and form novel species associations. In addition to warming-induced northward and upslope shifts, climate change causes more complex changes in our simulations, such as reversed conversions between forest types that currently share similar bioclimatic ranges. These results underline the importance of considering community interactions and transient dynamics in modeling studies of climate change impacts on forest ecosystems.
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The Importance of Land-Use Legacies to Ecology and Conservation
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Recognition of the importance of land-use history and its legacies in most ecological systems has been a major factor driving the recent focus on human activity as a legitimate and essential subject of environmental science. Ecologists, conservationists, and natural resource policymakers now recognize that the legacies of land-use activities continue to influence ecosystem structure and function for decades or centuries—or even longer— after those activities have ceased. Consequently, recognition of these historical legacies adds explanatory power to our understanding of modern conditions at scales from organisms to the globe and reduces missteps in anticipating or managing for future conditions. As a result, environmental history emerges as an integral part of ecological science and conservation planning. By considering diverse ecological phenomena, ranging from biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles to ecosystem resilience to anthropogenic stress, and by examining terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in temperate to tropical biomes, this article demonstrates the ubiquity and importance of land-use legacies to environmental science and management.
Keywords: land use, disturbance, conservation, ecosystem process, natural resource management
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