Jason Greenlee and Jean Langenheim combined fire scar dating, historical documents and fire behavior modeling to reconstruct fire regimes for the major vegetation types around the Monterey Bay area from pre-‐11,000 BP to 1979.
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Keith Lombardo and his colleagues attempted to fill a void in the fire history knowledge for pre-Euro-American chaparral fire regimes by selecting an endemic tree commonly associated with chaparral at higher elevations.
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In a comparative study of fire sizes north and south of the U.S./Mexican border Minnich (1983) demonstrated differences during a nine year period in non-‐forested landscapes that included chaparral, sage scrub and annual grassland.
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USGS Western Ecological Research Center publication brief.
These in-depth studies of the ecological role of fire and management implications cover some of the most critical regions in the state.
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Dendrochronology and other methods were used to reconstruct the fire history from 1500 through 2006 in the vicinity of Mt. Irish.
Read MoreIn central coastal California, a complex mosaic of vegetation types appears to be largely unrelated to substrate and more strongly determined by disturbance history, in particular human induced changes in fire frequency.
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In a recent USFS publication, USGS scientist Dr. Jon Keeley led a team of scientists from various agencies and academic institutions in developing a framework that will inform fire management of ecosystems.
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This brief is based on a turn-‐of-‐the-century publication which is the first and most complete natural history of chaparral and its relationship to fire.
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A major emphasis of the review is the techniques for converting chaparral to grassland using different methods and their related effectiveness.
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Wells contended that fire was the selective force behind the convergent evolution of the obligate seeding strategy in Arctostaphylos and Ceanothus, and was accompanied by prolific speciation, due in part to a much greater number of sexual generations for seeders than for resprouters.
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In this paleoecology study of sediments at Point Reyes National Seashore (PORE), Scott Anderson documented changes in vegetation resulting from climate, people and fire over the past 15,000 years.
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Large fire events were a normal part of southern California’s natural history based on charcoal evidence.
Read MoreStand-replacing patch size was highly variable in a high elevation mixed conifer forest in the Sierra Nevada with a range of variation dominated by many small patches < 10 acres (4 ha) and few large patches >148 acres (60 ha).
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This project verified the common assumption that annual growth rings can be used to determine age in California’s woody chaparral species.
Read MoreThis 1987 paper by Richard Minnich summarizes newspaper accounts for selected fires between 1868 and 1900 in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California, and describes in detail the behavior of three summer fires in 1896, 1898 and 1900 on Mt. Wilso.
Read MoreThis report is one of the first and most dramatic accounts of the southern California “fire-‐flood” cycle that documented the magnitude of postfire debris flows in denuded watersheds.
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The California Fire Science Consortium is divided into 4 geographic regions and 1 wildland-urban interface (WUI) team. Statewide coordination of this program is based at UC Berkeley.
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This regional Fire Science Exchange is one of 15 regional fire science exchanges.
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